A feast for Freudians – THE UNCANNY at the Sigmund Freud Museum

The food is on the table. The daughter sits bored in front of her untouched plate, father and son stare into space. It could be an everyday family scene that US photographer Gregory Crewdson has staged here – if it weren’t for the extra plate in front. And the figure of the impassive-looking, stark-naked woman who has entered the room unnoticed. She is holding a lizard in her hand, flowers and soil spread out under her dirty feet. Is she the absentee who has been covered up for? The mother? A memory? Crewdson’s father was a psychoanalyst. The patient conversations he overheard still influence his tableau photographs today; his theme is the strange in the everyday, the unspoken – the uncanny.

His work thus perfectly captures the essence of the current special exhibition at the Sigmund Freud Museum. The famous psychoanalyst lived here in the rooms at Berggasse 19 until 1938. Since 1971, the former family home and practice rooms have served as a documentation center for his life and work, as well as a library and research center. Three former living rooms have been combined for temporary exhibitions. Crewdson’s photography, Birgit Jürgenssen’s “Freud’s Couch” and Helmut Newton’s portrait photography by Pierre & Denise Klosoowski hang here. Markus Schinwald’s “Misfits” stand in the room: three marionette-like, childlike figures that occasionally raise a hand in a ghostly manner. The mechanical sound fills the room.

What all of the works by the 13 artists have in common is the mood of the uncanny – a central category of Freud, which he used to justify his assumption of an unconscious activity of the psyche. And, by the way, a grandiose, barely translatable word: in German, starting with the word ‘home’ (‘heim’) as the epitome of familiarity, of belonging, the transformation begins with the suffix ‘lich’: ‘heim-lich’ as a state of concealment. When extended by the prefix ‘un’, the meaning shifts completely into the threatening and unfamiliar: ‘un-heim-lich’, ‘uncanny’. A state that has always inspired artists – with or without reference to Freud.

Here in Freud’s former apartment, the works are a feast for every Freudian. In the densely packed presentation – which was preceded by a more comprehensive exhibition at the Kunsthalle Tübingen – each work can be assigned a keyword, a thesis by Freud: patriarchal violence in Francesca Woodman’s work, traumatic experiences in Louise Bourgeois’ work, animistic souls in Schinwald’s work or the ‘veiled character’ of the uncanny in Stephanie Pflaum’s installation “Skin”. Incidentally, it can be seen at any time in the public exhibition space (‘Schauraum’) of the museum on the street on Berggasse 19: You can see organs and embryos behind the beautiful glow of the glittering pearls. Uncanny!

THE UNCANNY. Sigmund Freud and Art, special exhibition at the Sigmund Freud Museum, 6.4.-4.11.2024