Robson Orr TenTen Award 2022

For the Robson Orr TenTen Award's fifth year, the Government Art Collection, in collaboration with Outset Contemporary Art Fund, commissioned artist Rachel Whiteread to create a unique, limited edition print that will be shown in diplomatic buildings around the world.

Untitled (Bubble)

In 2012, Rachel Whiteread was commissioned to create a print for London’s Summer Olympics. Her work was a celebration of people coming together, the familiar Olympic rings turning into a pattern of overlapping circles that suggested marks left by the bottoms of bottles or glasses at a party.

By contrast, the circles in her new work for 2022’s TenTen project bring to mind traces of an invisible virus. Whiteread is known for making the invisible visible; these abstract shapes reflect both the microscopic form of COVID-19 itself and a time during the pandemic when we were reduced to only having close physical contact with those within our ‘bubble’.

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Bubble), 2022 © Rachel Whiteread – Commissioned by the Government Art Collection for The Robson Orr TenTen Award 2022.

In denser areas of the print, where we see ‘a bubble within a bubble within a bubble’, as the artist describes it, that original idea of celebration lingers. In the overlaps, we are reminded of those ecstatic moments when we reunited with our loved ones.

Whiteread exploits the medium to enhance the sense of fragility and uncertainty we all experienced during this time. Her print layers different hues of monochrome ink. At certain stages she adds watercolour marks by hand, using it in a similar way to build up incredibly thin washes of colour. Whiteread is interested in how the fabric of our daily existence bears the accumulated traces of previous lives.

To purchase a limited edition TenTen print and contribute to the Government Art Collection’s mission to support UK art and emerging UK artists, please get in touch.

Rachel Whiteread

Born in Ilford in 1963, Rachel Whiteread has lived and worked for most of her life in East London. She studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic and sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art during the 1980s. In 1993, she was the first woman to win the Turner Prize following her project House (1993; destroyed 1994), a life-sized cast of a condemned terraced house in London’s East End, which was demolished to make way for new developments. The sculpture sparked urgent debates around the politics of urbanisation. Other important public commissions followed with Water Tower (1998) in New York, the Holocaust Memorial (2000) in Vienna, Monument for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square (2001) and Cabin for Govenors Island, New York (2016) .

The TenTen Robson Orr Award

Ten years, ten prints. Every year, the Government Art Collection commissions an outstanding British artist to create a print, with the support of philanthropists Sybil Robson Orr and Matthew Orr.

Starting in 2018, and for the next ten years, the Government Art Collection will select outstanding British artists to create original print works for the Collection to display around the world. Artists including Hurvin Anderson, Tacita Dean, Yinka Shonibare CBE and Lubaina Himid have created original works for the Collection for TenTen. At the same time, annual sales from these prints will raise funds so that the Collection can continue to acquire art by emerging artists in the UK.