Private View: 23rd November 2017
Gazelli Art House is delighted to present new works by Jane McAdam Freud in her upcoming exhibition Object – Fix Me in Your Turquoise Gaze. Created during the artist’s two-year residency at Harrow School in London, McAdam Freud explores the boundaries between painting and sculpture and the authority of these two disciplines in context to each other. Working with discarded objects or ‘stuff’, the artist drew inspiration from her place of work, an abandoned studio set within the school’s original sculpture department.
“I started the residency responding to the studio space with its abandoned junk, which I was told I could make use of. I saw it as ‘lovingly stored’ for potential use. It felt sad that it would be thrown away, so I started to pick through everything much like a jackdaw or crow might.”
From these discards McAdam Freud’s sculptures arise imbued with universal signifiers and the artist invites her materials, like subjects, to take on contemporary lives of their own.
Throughout these new works, McAdam Freud engages with the overt symbolism many of these objects present. The school’s institutional setting forces the artist to question her ambivalent relationship to authority, a complicated mixture of awe and rebellion. Situated within an educational establishment imbued with unprecedented history and hierarchy, the inanimate objects in turn instruct her work: they become her educators. The value of each piece is subsequently re-viewed, re-asserted and re-invented.
“I enjoyed working in this atmosphere of change, transforming the old and the ugly…By finding and saving these ‘things’, I felt I was returning something while simultaneously managing unexplained feelings of loss, in the way that one thing inevitably evokes another.”
About Jane McAdam Freud
Jane McAdam Freud (B. 1958, UK) is an internationally acclaimed sculptor and multi-disciplinary artist – drawings, prints, digital media – with a career extending over thirty years. Graduating with honours from Central School of Art, London in 1981, she was then awarded the British Art Medal Scholarship in Rome – an accolade she held for three years. She subsequently attained her Masters degree at the Royal College of Art, where she was also teaching, in 1995. Most often recognised for her sculpture, McAdam Freud’s work features prominently in the permanent collections of museums and galleries around the world, including the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), National Gallery archives (London), Brooklyn Museum, in New York and the National Gallery of Greece. The British Museum made their first acquisition in 1979 while she was still a student at the Central.
Jane is currently an associate lecturer at Central St Martins and regularly teaches at a number of other institutions in London. Her study of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis has resulted in a number of collaborations with psychoanalytic societies and centres around the world. Along with many other international institutions, McAdam Freud has delivered papers and exhibited in Taipei, South Korea, Toronto, Istanbul, Lugano, Lyon, New York and Beverly Hills. This research component continues to inform her practice and Jane’s work frequently finds inspiration from the rich source of her own family background, referencing both the remarkable collection of her great-grandfather Sigmund Freud’s ancient sculpture and the cultural legacy of Freudian psychoanalysis which has had a profound and lasting effect on the contemporary psyche.
