Michael Rakowitz

Enthralling environments tell gripping tales that haunt buildings and objects, revealing the utopian aspirations and the disasters of modern times, in this debut survey of internationally renowned Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz (b.1973).

Premiering Rakowitz’s most important projects from two decades, eight multifaceted installations draw on architecture, cultural artefacts, cuisine and geopolitics from 750BC to today. Whitechapel Gallery’s headline exhibition for summer 2019 coincides with the display in London of the artist’s Lamassu sculpture for the Fourth Plinth, part of his epic and ongoing attempt to recreate every cultural artefact lost or destroyed during the Iraq war.

Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Gallery and co-curator of the exhibition, says: “From the Assyrian winged bull he placed in Trafalgar Square to the stone books he had carved from the ruins of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas, sculptor, detective and some time cook Michael Rakowitz turns the disasters of war into beacons of knowledge and hope.”