Rachel Whiteread’s show at Luhring Augustine is made up of smaller pieces: plaster and resin castings of doors, windows, and aluminum soda cans.  They don’t have the same resonance that her larger works, architectural-like constructions that implicate the scale of the human figure, do.  But each has an indelible object-quality.  Whiteread has taken things that ordinarily rest at the edge of our attention and recast them as discrete, important objects.

The objects are quietly seductive.  The translucent, candy-colored resin pieces, which capture light prettily, draw attention to their own imperfections (air bubbles in the medium, impurities in the formwork, surface imprints of the release agent) and, in effect, their materiality.  In photographs Whiteread’s work has the seductive gleam of minimal art, and falls easily into abstraction.  But these pieces, when seen from up close, aren’t minimal at all.  It’s not their obvious referentiality that complicate matters, but their physical particularities.