Double - Doors II (A + B) – Works – Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Double - Doors II (A + B)

Rachel Whiteread (British, born in 1963)

2006–07

Medium/Technique Plasticized plaster with interior aluminum framework, two panels

Dimensions (A) Height x width (White door): 78 11/16 × 31 1/2 × 4 3/8 in. (199.9 × 80 × 11.1 cm)
(B) Height x width (Light grey glazed door): 78 × 29 7/8 × 4 3/8 in. (198.1 × 75.9 × 11.1 cm)

Credit Line Museum purchase in honor of Cheryl Brutvan, Robert L. Beal, Enid L. Beal and Bruce L. Beal Curator of Contemporary Art, 1998–2008, with funds donated by the Barbara Lee Endowment for Contemporary Art by Women, Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser Fund, Elizabeth and J. Atwood Ives, Joyce and Edward Linde, Ann and Graham Gund, Richard and Nancy Lubin, Davis and Carol Noble, Susan W. Paine, Robert and Jane Burke, John F. Cogan, Jr. and Mary L. Cornille, Henry and Lois Foster Contemporary Purchase Fund, Audrey and Jim Foster, Marlene and David Persky, Gail and Ernst von Metzsch, Eloise and Arthur Hodges, Steven Rogowski, Lorraine and Alan Bressler, Ellen and Robert Jaffe, Katherine R. Kirk, Linda and Daniel Waintrup, Rhonda and Michael Zinner, Allison D. Salke, and David Andrew Trust

Accession Number2008.643.1-2

NOT ON VIEW

CollectionsEurope, Contemporary Art

ClassificationsSculpture

Look carefully—this work is more complicated than it seems. These are not doors; instead, they capture the space created by doors. Whiteread made plaster casts of both sides of two doors, then assembled the casts back to back. The finished work combines the spaces on either side of a threshold—fusing entrance and exit into one solid form. The pale doors suggest the ambiguous emotions attached to coming and going and, in the way they resemble funerary slabs, maybe even the fleeting passage of life.

Provenance2008, sold by Gagosian Gallery, London, to the MFA. (Accession Date: September 17 2008)