JANE MCADAM FREUD: AN ABSENT PRESENCE: A RETROSPECTIVE IN DIALOGUE WITH LOUISE BOURGEOIS AND HOLLY STEVENSON

4 July - 6 September 2025
  • “I work at the edges where art and psychoanalysis meet.” 

    — Jane McAdam Freud

    An Absent Presence at Gazelli Art House is the first exhibition of Jane McAdam Freud’s work since her passing in 2022, bringing together deeply personal sculptures that explore life, death, and legacy, alongside works by Holly Stevenson and Louise Bourgeois. The show reflects on psychoanalysis, memory, and emotional inheritance through materials ranging from medals and chicken wire to ceramics and wool, with Stevenson responding directly to Jane’s legacy and their shared Freudian lineage. Across three generations of artists, the exhibition meditates on how objects can hold psychological weight and serve as vessels for presence, absence, and transformation.
  • Jane McAdam Freud, Self-Portrait, 2001

    Jane McAdam Freud

    Self-Portrait, 2001 Bronze
    39 x 30 x 24 cm
    15 2/8 x 11 6/8 x 9 3/8 ins
    1 of 1
  • JANE MCADAM FREUD

    1958–2022

    Jane McAdam Freud dedicated her creative output to the exploration of life, death and the libido. Through key pieces from across her career, An Absent Presence examines Jane’s astute philosophical and psychological approach to art making. It reveals the breadth and technical ability of her practice, expressed through a multitude of medium and scale, from intimate hand-held sculptures to larger-than-life installations. The exhibition seeks to raise questions about the ability of objects to contain and transmit the presence of their maker or owner. Jane explained that her works existed in the ether before she gave them form. She described her authorship as being “an absent presence”, stating “it came before me and goes on after me, it doesn’t live and die as flesh does.”

     

    Often referring to the cathartic nature of making art as a way to process one’s emotion, Jane differentiated it from therapy. For her, therapy is about “talking it all out”, while art is about “feeling it all out.” Through her bold and varied sculptural practice Jane processed her ancestry, trauma and life experiences through the act of making – her art gave life to her emotions and experiences.

  • Jane McAdam Freud, daughter of Lucian Freud, was an internationally acclaimed sculptor and multi-disciplinary artist. Much of her life was...

    Jane McAdam Freud, daughter of Lucian Freud, was an internationally acclaimed sculptor and multi-disciplinary artist. Much of her life was dedicated to encouraging a critical discourse around arts and psychoanalysis, whilst engaging younger audiences through her active teaching roles.

     

    McAdam Freud lived and worked in London, UK, having graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from Central Saint Martins College, London, in 1981 and a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Art in 1995. Most often recognised for her sculptures, McAdam Freud’s work features prominently in the permanent collections of museums and galleries around the world, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the National Gallery Archive, London, and The Brooklyn Museum, New York. The British Museum made their first acquisition in 1979 while she was still a student at Central Saint Martins.

     

    The artist was an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins, and regularly taught at a number of other institutions in London. Her study of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis resulted in a number of colaborations with psychoanalytic societies and centres in New York and Beverly Hills. McAdam Freud's work draws from the rich source of her own family background, referencing both the remarkable collection of antiquities and sculptural objects collected by her grandfather and the cultural legacy of Freudian psychoanalysis which has had a profound and lasting effect on the contemporary psyche.

  • Jane McAdam Freud, Digging For God, 2017

    Jane McAdam Freud

    Digging For God, 2017 Metal and wood
    104 x 46 x 82 cm
    40 7/8 x 18 1/8 x 32 2/8 ins
  • HOLLY STEVENSON

    b. 1975

    Holly Stevenson presents ceramic pieces made in 2024 in response to Jane’s life and work and the enduring legacy of psychoanalytic theories. The works were first presented as part  of the inaugural Freud Artist Residency (F.A.R.) in Příbor, Czech Republic, the birth-place of Sigmund Freud and second home to Jane McAdam Freud. The exhibition was titled Tracing The Irretraceable with Stevenson installing her works alongside Jane’s and reflecting on the act of tracing as both a psychoanalytical and artistic method.

     

    Stevenson was especially influenced by Jane’s self-portraits and depictions of family, which prompted her to make a body of work more explicitly figurative and personal than before. These include Hector Speaks Volumes (2024) which depicts her son in a golden glazed ceramic, with red knitted wool spooling from his mouth. Stevenson, in the footsteps of Jane, questions how artefacts become significant beyond their individual intrinsic beauty or craftsmanship; they hold the remains of the past actions of their makers and owners.

  • Holly Stevenson is a British artist living and working in London. Ceramic and psychoanalytic processes enmesh within her work and...

    Holly Stevenson is a British artist living and working in London. Ceramic and psychoanalytic processes enmesh within her work and the resulting idiosyncratic forms play with associations trapped between mind and bodily matters. She graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design, fine art MA in 2011 and was awarded the MFI Flat Time House Graduate Award, supported by the John Latham Foundation. In 2021 she received her first public sculpture commission for Another Mother from theCOLAB for The Artist’s Garden and her focus on ceramics in the expanded field led her to take part in Frieze Sculpture 2023 where she showed The Debate, an installation that reinterpreted the symbolic egg.

     

    Psychoanalysis is understood to be both a practical and informative part of art making and Stevenson's ongoing studio project, Sigmund Freud’s Ashtray, explores the eponymously labelled artefact in clay as a fluid bodily metaphor: Her vessels diligently embody the ashtray and cigar as though they were two gendered male and female forms, the yonic ovular dish and the cylindrical phallic cigar, as she reconfigures them into a material language of her own. Stevenson will hold solo exhibitions at the Jane McAdam Freud Museum and Gallery in the Czech Republic and the Freud Museum, London in 2024/25. 

  • Holly Stevenson, Eye Feel The Sun, 2024

    Holly Stevenson

    Eye Feel The Sun, 2024 Plant: 36 x 20 x 23 cm, 14 1/8 x 7 7/8 x 9 in
    Each shoe: 4.5 x 21.5 x 8 cm, 1 3/4 x 8 1/2 x 3 1/8 in
  • Drawings are thought feathers, they are ideas that I seize in mid-flight and put down on paper.” 

     

    — Louise Bourgeois

  • Louise Bourgeois

    1911–2010
    Louise Bourgeois took the notions of the unconscious and the uncanny from Freudian theory and provocatively channelled them through her...

    Louise Bourgeois took the notions of the unconscious and the uncanny from Freudian theory and provocatively channelled them through her highly personal and embodied experiences. An Absent Presence contains works by Bourgeois, such as I Have Been To Hell and Back (2007), that are in dialogue with McAdam Freud and Stevenson through the motifs of clothing and domestic space, the use of word play and a wry reflection on mortality.

     

    Louise Bourgeois was a pioneering French-American artist whose psychologically charged work explored memory, sexuality, and the unconscious. Working across sculpture, installation, drawing and textiles, she developed a highly personal symbolic language—often featuring spiders, beds, cages and fragmented bodies—to give form to emotional states and early trauma. Bourgeois’s major retrospective at MoMA in 1982 marked a turning point in the recognition of women in postwar art history. She went on to represent the United States at the 1993 Venice Biennale and was the first artist to exhibit in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2000. Her work is held in leading museum collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, Tate, MoMA, Guggenheim, and the Whitney Museum. A touchstone for generations of artists, her legacy continues to shape conversations around identity, the body, and the subconscious.

  • Presence and Absence in the Art of Jane McAdam Freud

    by Alyce Mahon
    Renowned art historian and professor Alyce Mahon reflects on the works of Jane McAdam Freud on the occasion of the artist's first posthumus exhibition at Gazelli Art House.

    A small stoneware clay sculpture that fits in the palm of the hand with a smaller red moulding clay insertion rounding out its concave belly on one side, all under the inscribed word ‘PRESENCE’, and a voided concave on  the other side, under the incised word ‘ABSENCE’, perfectly encapsulates the aesthetic of Jane McAdam Freud  (1958–2022). It is an emphatically haptic work that wants to be held and inspected in the hand; it is the subtle  play of texture and text that lends this sculpture its significance. The intimate scale ensures a familiarity – one  thinks of a medal, a wish or worry stone, or the gentle, erotic touch of a thumb or finger – while the dialogue  between its form and its inscription opens a chain of associations allowing that sense of familiarity to become  beautifully strange such that a tangible piece becomes a conceptual act. 

     

    As W.T.J. Mitchell writes, “objects are the way things appear to the subject – that is, with a name, an identity  […] Things on the other hand … [signal] the moment when the object becomes the Other, when the sardine  can looks back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny.”1 McAdam  Freud lingers in this peculiar sense of the object as the Other, in all its uncanny potential. In 2017 she spoke of  her great-grandfather Sigmund Freud and his concept of the unheimlich (uncanny) as facilitating “an artist’s  attempt to express an ambivalent or even antithetical emotion via an object, or indeed, subject.”2 

     

    A comparison between the bust Portrait of My Father (2010) and the two-faced relief sculpture titled Earthstone Triptych (2011) teases out this idea. We find a shift in the portraits of her father, Lucian Freud, drawn from  life and then his deathbed, through her treatment of clay. In the former, we bear witness to the upright commanding face of a patriarch, the imprint of her working hands a sign and symbol of her bond; in the latter we greet an entropic form, its state of decay reflected by the open eye on one side, a closed one on the other,  and the sculpture template flat on the floor, casting a shadow and incised into parts “reflecting [her] present  and absent siblings”.3 Completed after her father’s death, his presence is magnified by a mirror such that it becomes a memento mori – an homage to his memory and memory as a process. 

     

    Sigmund Freud’s understanding of the object as Other, where it sheds light on our subjective experience, also resonates with McAdam Freud’s turn to bric-a-brac and the found object to construct assemblages. Brass (2015)  seems to nostalgically hark back to the flea market finds of the Surrealists in the 1920s, while the polished letters bring a Sixties, Pop Art, aesthetic to mind. The addition of language again shifts our phenomenological experience of the work: its distorted, amputated form and crushed orifice is emphatically mute while the bold  advertising-like vibrancy of the letters spelling out ‘BRASS’ gives it a voice. Digging for God (2017), also plays  with the power of words and their ability “to impart a description and suggest an instruction.”4 Not unlike  Marcel Duchamp’s Dada readymade In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915), we are witnessing a critique of the very  idea of objecthood, where one thing powers over another.

     

    In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud wrote of his grandson’s play with a wooden reel that he would throw  skilfully “over the edge of his curtained cot so that it disappeared inside, all the while making his expressive  ‘o-o-o-o’ sound, then used the string to pull the reel out of his cot again, but this time greeting its reappearance with a joyful Da! (‘Here!).”5 

     

    It evidenced the child’s “immense cultural achievement” in managing absence and loss as the toy symbolises  the mother from whom he is gradually being distanced. McAdam Freud’s Us (2011) is a striking example of such game play: Jane’s photographic portrait is cut and pasted (there is no photo editing manipulation) in dialogue with a portrait of Lucian. Their intense artistic gazes – an eye of each – fuse mid sequence, and then we find the imprint of the father poetically defied by his daughter. His absence finally becomes her presence, her artwork.

     


    1. WJT Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, University Chicago Press, 2005, pp. 156-57. 2. Jane McAdam Freud, Object Authority, exh.cat., Harrow School London, 2017, np. 

    3. Jane McAdam Freud, “Lost Wax to Lost Fathers”, Grief and its Transcendence, Installations by British sculptor Jane McAdam Freud, Adele  Tutter and Léon Wurmser (eds), Routledge, 2015, p.138. 

    4. Jane McAdam Freud, quoted in Estelle Lovatt, Object: Fix Me in Your Turquoise Gaze, exh. cat. Gazelli House, London, 2017, p.10.

  • Alyce Mahon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and a Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938-1968 (2005), Eroticism  & Art (2005 & 2007), The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde (2020), the edited volumes Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades (Walther Konig, 2015) and Dorothea Tanning (Museo Reina Sofia & Tate Publishing, 2018), as  well as numerous book chapter, journal and catalogue essays on avant-garde, feminist, and contemporary art.  Mahon is also the co-editor of the International Journal of Surrealism [IJS] published by Minnesota University  Press and serves on the Board of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism [ISSS]. As exhibition  curator and scientific advisor, recent projects include Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire [MoSex, New York 2018- 19], Dorothea Tanning: Behind the Door Another Door [Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid and Tate Modern,  London, 2018-2019], SADE: Freedom or Evil [CCCB, Barcelona, 2023], Surrealism in the Service of Distraction  [Galerie Raphael Durazzo, Paris, 2024], and Ithell Colquhoun: A World Apart [Tate St Ives, Cornwall and Tate  Britain, London, 2025].
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