This retrospective of Rachel Whiteread’s inverted cast objects teaches us how to fall in love with the ordinary all over again

EXHIBITION OF THE WEEK RACHEL WHITEREAD Tate Britain, SW1

RACHEL Whiteread’s retrospective at Tate Britain celebrates a figure always surrounded by art-world approval and who has enjoyed moments of giddy fame, as well as goony scandal. Nearly 25 years ago she was awarded an “anti Turner Prize” of £40,000 by the K Foundation, dubbing her the “worst artist of the year”, to go with the £20,000 she received for winning the actual Turner that year. Anyone might be forgiven for wondering what the fuss is about with her. She casts objects in plaster — so what?

The question of what has actually been done is quite interesting. Where you think you’re looking at a cast of a door or a room, it’s really as if the door or room has been turned inside out. You notice after a while that the panels of the “door” are raised not indented — it’s an anti-door, not a door.

And similarly with the room, it’s an inside-out room. You’re looking at scratches and scuffs, skirting boards, internal corners, all turned outwards. A staircase becomes a monumental ziggurat; a room becomes a giant cube with irregular indents.

The walls have been removed at Tate Britain’s level two gallery in order to provide 1,500sq m of vast, open space. There are enormous works — casts of rooms, staircases and bookshelves — as well as medium-sized works: mattresses, desks, doors and windows. But there are also small things: for example, the interiors of hot-water bottles, where casting material has been poured in and allowed to dry and then the rubber of the bottle was cut away.

What emerges is a hot-water bottle, yes, but also a sort of approximate classical sculpture of a human torso. Objects only inches high, in off shades of primaries, such as little 3D abstract paintings, turn out to be casts in coloured resin of toilet-roll holders, or cardboard tubes and packaging.

Usually with such a volume of work over so many years you would expect to be going from one self-contained space to another. But the specially opened out gallery allows you to take in everything from only two or three vantage points a few yards apart. The arrangement is an achievement in itself. Such variety of scale, shapes and colours could be jangling, but instead it is a great organisation of different accents.

Everything is orchestrated to offer an impression wherever you look of a single shimmering unity: translucent resin in different shades, sepulchral white plaster, transparent amber, augmented plaster in various greys, plaster surfaces supplemented with glass or wood, surfaces that are scruffy and homely and surfaces that are sheer and modern.

When Whiteread made Mantle (1988) she had only recently left art school but it already set the tone for what was to come. The cast object was a typical mid-20th century dressing table, intended for use by young girls, complete with flowery patterned textiles. The frilly component has vanished and the original object is almost unrecognisable. The original dresser’s glass surface lies across an assembly of offsquare white cubes. The glass suggests air or light; it has become a metaphor for atmosphere.

The whole thing is satisfying not because it is easy to see what it is but

The effectiveness of her work lies in ingenious and gentle richness, the emotion of shapes and surfaces

because it resonates with pleasing associations. It suggests ordinary life but also the sensibility of an earlier era. Sculptures and reliefs by Brâncusi, say, or Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth — a cool, pared-back, stripped-down feel: an aesthetic in which nature’s variety is compressed and simplified, but you are supposed to feel that it is all in there somehow.

Whiteread has been championed over the years for deep meaning, a poetics of ordinary objects, and a feel for the deathly. Mantle sums up the ways in which she does all that without pretentious bombast. The effectiveness of her work lies in ingenious and gentle richness, the emotion of shapes and surfaces, and not in a sledgehammer effect of big statements and shattering challenges.

The work in general has a formula: something everyday is transformed so the human dimension is retained but a quality of subtle elusiveness is added. It’s more ghostly than charming. When the ordinary becomes menacing the word for it is “uncanny”, it is an atmosphere typical of dreams. She is good at bringing it about unexpectedly. Anything whitened will be ghostly, of course. But the size of something in the real world, whether it is a fireplace or a staircase, or a hotwater bottle, and the placement of its various components, can all be subtly tweaked so these factors become strange and new, and a bit pulsating, where usually we never think about them.

If there is a poetic formula to her work it is that ordinary things around us are used mostly unconsciously, but art heightens their presence in our lives, making us suddenly aware of all the environments we have ever lived in, ageing and crumbling, and time passing. She is good at exploring all this via strategies of making and presenting what we could easily imagine are pretty simple — cast an object, present it in a gallery — but are actually complicated and various, giving rise to many subtle shades of feeling.

Whiteread has also put together a show of other artists’ work as a complement to her own. It is a powerful event in its own right. Anthony Caro makes an incredibly rich spatial arrangement out of metal mesh and