Temporarily Accessioned-The role of Printmaking within my Freud Museums installations

Temporarily Accessioned-The role of Printmaking within Freud Museum Installations.

In 2016/17 I had exhibitions at the Freud Museum in London and Vienna.

These were both site specific exhibitions; in Vienna in the now relatively empty apartments that Freud lived and worked before his migration to London in 1938 while the exhibition in London was in the rich environment of the Freud Museum complete with his furniture including the couch and his extensive collection of antiquities and objects d’art.

This illustrated paper will consider how an expanded form of Printmaking was a key component in both exhibitions and helped shape strategies for working with such collections. These included 3D scanning all the antiquities on Freud’s desk and from these making 3D prints in order to produce a ‘ghost of the desk’ and arranging for the coat purchased by Freud for his migration to London to be x-rayed by the National Gallery in order to provide the data for a life size digital print. Furthermore, commercial offset printing was used to produce both a series of postcards and an artists book, while laser-cut woodblocks provided the matrices for new relief prints.

The exhibitions provided a rare opportunity to test out the efficacy of the work within two distinct contexts. The exhibition in Vienna, whilst obviously a location loaded with history and prior meaning was more akin to the ‘white cube’, while in London, surrounded by Sigmund & Anna Freud’s artefacts my artworks had to compete for space.

On reflection, the history of printmaking has been about finding spaces to occupy or borrow, unlike painting for example where the museum, palace or cathedral walls have offered a ready and often permanent space.