An Internal Difficulty

Australian Artists at the Freud Museum London

An Internal Difficulty showcases the outcomes of a research residency funded by the Western Australian Department for Culture and the Arts and the Australia Council for the Arts at The Freud Museum London, in early 2013. It brings together some of the most innovative mid-career practitioners currently working from Western Australia to reconsider Sigmund Freud and his work in relation to his domestic context.

Based in the London townhouse in which Freud and his family settled after fleeing the Nazi occupation of Austria, the Museum houses the late psychoanalyst’s extensive collections of art, antiquities, textiles, prints and furniture, as well as his library, and an archive of correspondence. Its centerpiece is Freud’s study, maintained just as it was during his lifetime, and containing numerous objects that have become famous in their own right through their association to his work, including ‘the’ iconic psychoanalytical couch.

The residency additionally allowed the artists privileged insight into Freud’s final months, through viewing items from the collection that are not on public display due to their personal nature, including the couch upon which he died in 1939, in addition to the mouth prostheses and cranial X-rays associated with his terminal cancer. In reflecting these experiences, the resulting artworks bear a fitting relationship to psychoanalysis, a therapeutic discipline dependent upon an extended intimacy between an analyst and patient. As such, An Internal Difficulty represents a unique and intimate reconsideration of one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An Internal Difficulty Australian Artists at the Freud Museum London is curated by Andrew Nicholls.

The tour of this exhibition is managed by ART ON THE MOVE.

ART ON THE MOVE is supported by the State Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts and the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Image credit: Untitled Study (detail) by Andrew Nicholls & Travis Kelleher, 2013 Image courtesy the artists with thanks to the Freud Museum London.