Over the last few months, while researching for the critical publication, I’ve come across the work of several prominent female artists whose practices resonate with Belén Uriel’s. In the next few blog posts, I plan to explore her work in conversation with theirs, primarily as a way to develop my own writing.
When encountering Belén Uriel’s sculptures, it’s easy to feel like you’ve stumbled into the negative space of the everyday: where ordinary objects lose their function and become strange again. Chairs sag inward, glass panes appear too supple, and textiles stiffen into unfamiliar geometries. A tension arises, somewhere between utility and abstraction, and situates her work in quiet dialogue with another sculptor of absence: Rachel Whiteread.
Best known for her casts of domestic interiors, giving form to what is typically invisible, Whitehead solidifies space. From bathtubs to stairwells, she fills in these familiar structures, often in concrete or resin. Uriel, on the other hand, approaches form from the outside-in. Rather than casting voids, she builds around impressions: fabric stretched across frames, mesh molded into shape, glass blown into silicone forms. Both artists subvert the logic of the object, but where Whiteread offers solidity, Uriel often offers permeability by betraying their material expectations.
Similarly, we see works that demonstrate a sustained engagement with the politics of the domestic, though the artists approach this theme through distinct material and conceptual frameworks. Whiteread’s practice often monumentalizes absence, translating the overlooked spatial residues of domestic life into solid, weighty forms. Works such as Ghost (1990) and House (1993) render the voids of lived interiors as permanent structures, foregrounding the silence and erasure embedded within domestic architecture. In doing so, Whiteread positions absence as a powerful index of memory and loss. Uriel builds on this materialist tradition, yet her approach is marked by greater formal and cultural fluidity.
Having lived and worked across Spain, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, Uriel incorporates a transnational sensibility that destabilizes fixed readings of domesticity. Her sculptures frequently reference common household forms, such as her frequent use of fragments from the everyday Monobloc lawn chairs. However, she references these forms through materials that resist stability. The use of glass lends her works a sense of elasticity and impermanence. These forms are legible across cultural contexts, yet they remain open-ended, shaped as much by translation and migration as by tradition.
Despite her invocation of recognizable forms, Uriel avoids sentimentality or nostalgia. Whereas Whiteread’s casts often function as memorials, anchoring absence in concrete or resin, Uriel’s works suggest a continual process of becoming. Her sculptures appear to respond to environmental pressures, bodily interactions, and material fatigue. In this way, her focus lies not in preserving a discrete past but in tracing the ways objects and bodies mutually inform one another across time and use. Both artists invite sustained, close observation and pose the question of what remains when an object is no longer present in its original form. However, Uriel complicates the binary of presence and absence by introducing a third condition—one defined by softness, transparency, and movement. If Whiteread’s practice casts in permanence, Uriel casts in possibility. She asks what it might mean for a form to remain adaptable, to retain the imprint of use without solidifying into a final state.
Rather than replicating Whiteread’s strategy, Uriel inverts it. Her work does not oppose solidity with fragility but redefines material presence through impermanence, gesture, and translation. In doing so, she extends and reconfigures the questions that Whiteread first posed, offering a sculptural language attuned to fluidity, cross-cultural reference, and embodied experience.
Babs Haenen
Great