One of the leading British sculptors of her generation, Whiteread is interested in themes of memory and death. Having taken as a starting point the sculpture A Cast of the Space under My Chair (1965–68) by the American post-Minimalist Bruce Nauman, Whiteread first earned recognition with a full-scale concrete cast of the negative space—the empty interior—of an abandoned row house in a depressed area of East London. Her recent public sculptures include a translucent-resin cast of a giant water tower, installed on a Manhattan rooftop, and the negative interior space of a library, constructed on the Judenplatz in Vienna as a memorial to Holocaust victims. This work, her first in bronze, consists of two nearly identical waist-high forms coated with white paint. The tops of the forms, one slightly convex, one concave, derive from used mortuary tables purchased by Whiteread and employed to make floor sculptures, slabs cast in rubber. The slope of the slabs suggests that there are drainage holes at one end of each table. To make the antiseptic volumes of Untitled (Pair) Whiteread added sides to the slabs, creating tomblike objects that she first installed in rows of nine pairs.