Jane McAdam Freud
13 6/8 x 14 1/8 x 14 7/8 ins
musings about what motivated her great-grandfather to collect and the meanings he saw in them, she was ready to begin making connections between her works and the objects he collected.’
P.18 Jane said: ‘Freud’s collection so mirrored my own works. I was able to spend twenty months working directly with his classical antiquities from the history of western and near eastern art.’
P 78 Q: Your exhibition explores a number of different kinds of relationship. For instance, you pair your own work with a selection of Freud’s collection of antiquities. Could you explain the basis for some of the connections you have made?
Jane said: I should start by identifying the obvious physical connection between myself and my great grandfather Sigmund Freud. This relationship provides the principle basis or primal driver for looking at other connections. Freud collected ‘sculpture’, I make sculpture. That in itself evokes my curiosity and forges a strong link. My aim is to display through ‘pairing’, aesthetic and sculptural connections which have come through the activity of collecting antiquities and the activity of making sculpture.
P. 86 (The (Venus (Roman Bust) and the Aphrodite (Greek Bust) were both used in Jane’s installation ‘Allora’)
Q: Are our relationships and the way we live now, inextricably bound to the past? Your work ‘Allora’ seems to suggest they are.
J: ‘Allora from the Italian and meaning ‘Now then’ is inspired by the twinned setting of the pair of marble busts which Freud housed in his study, at either end of the mantelpiece.
That the Italian word ‘allora’ goes back to Roman times is also apt as I have enlarged these two works of antiquity from Freud’s collection, one Greek and one Roman. For my installation ‘Alloea’ these pieces face inwards and are alternated with busts of two members of the Museum Staff. The words Now Then consecutively run across the backs of the four pieces while we look at the image of a Circle projected by mirrors and the repetition of faces reflected back to include the viewer.
Exhibitions
New Mythologies, Gazelli Art House, London, UK (2023)Family Matter, Gazelli Art House, London, UK (2012)
Jane McAdam Freud, Wooyang Museum of Contemporary Art, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea (2016)
