The Sight of Something: Glenn Brown and Mathew Weir: Freud Museum, London
Current and Forthcoming exhibition
Taking their cue from Freud's observation that childhood terrors can be triggered by "the sight of something," British artists Glenn Brown and Mathew Weir explore the rich ambiguity of this phrase with a selection of drawings, paintings and sculptures at the Freud Museum in London and in dialogue with the artefacts and history of the house. A central theme of this project is mark making, clearest perhaps in the act of drawing and the inscription of lines, and linked to psychoanalysis through both the effort to find and create traces of the past, whether through circumscribing a traumatic event or through unravelling the forgotten and repressed details of one's history.
Drawing has been an important part of both Brown and Weir's practices, and often has an urgency and immediacy that distinguishes it from other creative outlets. We could think here of the famous Dali sketches of Freud, penned "hastily but accurately into a drawing book," and which bring out powerfully the impact of their encounter, as well as the celebrated metaphor - and practice - of weaving used by Anna Freud to describe the multi-layered structure of the psyche and the psychoanalytic process.
Both artists present complex, ambiguous visual spaces. In Brown's work, images can be both seen and unseen, details found, lost and then re-found and interpreted. They shift and move, often containing more than one element or point of view. Faces and body parts merge and overlap, become sexual, sexualised and visually playful. This resonates closely not only with the psychoanalytic emphasis on the hidden and the sexual, but with Freud's fascination with two-faced figures, and his explorations of the many aspects of dualism that play such a large part in his work. Weir's work also involves the play of the seen and unseen, and the role of pain in creative practice, as a historical factor and as an individual impetus in creative endeavour. Many images are sourced from art historical contexts, invoking the symbols of emotional states such as depression and melancholy, as well as using details from early modern medical illustration which focuses on the body, life and death.
Both Brown and Weir invite the viewer to think twice about the image, to revise and reinterpret, to question and rethink what they imagine they see, thus echoing the very process of analysis as a putting into question of what we take for granted and leave unchallenged. 'The Sight of Something' shows how any visual element can lead us back to the complex world of childhood anxieties once we engage with images that make us do this work, images that are never immediately unequivocal and that embody the processes of both remembering and forgetting.
Glenn Brown and Mathew Weir have exhibited together on a number of occasions, including Breaking God's Heart (London, 2003), Beyond Reality: British Painting Today (Prague, 2012), Heads Roll (2018, Sheffield) and Dark Lantern (Munich, 2019).
Drawing has been an important part of both Brown and Weir's practices, and often has an urgency and immediacy that distinguishes it from other creative outlets. We could think here of the famous Dali sketches of Freud, penned "hastily but accurately into a drawing book," and which bring out powerfully the impact of their encounter, as well as the celebrated metaphor - and practice - of weaving used by Anna Freud to describe the multi-layered structure of the psyche and the psychoanalytic process.
Both artists present complex, ambiguous visual spaces. In Brown's work, images can be both seen and unseen, details found, lost and then re-found and interpreted. They shift and move, often containing more than one element or point of view. Faces and body parts merge and overlap, become sexual, sexualised and visually playful. This resonates closely not only with the psychoanalytic emphasis on the hidden and the sexual, but with Freud's fascination with two-faced figures, and his explorations of the many aspects of dualism that play such a large part in his work. Weir's work also involves the play of the seen and unseen, and the role of pain in creative practice, as a historical factor and as an individual impetus in creative endeavour. Many images are sourced from art historical contexts, invoking the symbols of emotional states such as depression and melancholy, as well as using details from early modern medical illustration which focuses on the body, life and death.
Both Brown and Weir invite the viewer to think twice about the image, to revise and reinterpret, to question and rethink what they imagine they see, thus echoing the very process of analysis as a putting into question of what we take for granted and leave unchallenged. 'The Sight of Something' shows how any visual element can lead us back to the complex world of childhood anxieties once we engage with images that make us do this work, images that are never immediately unequivocal and that embody the processes of both remembering and forgetting.
Glenn Brown and Mathew Weir have exhibited together on a number of occasions, including Breaking God's Heart (London, 2003), Beyond Reality: British Painting Today (Prague, 2012), Heads Roll (2018, Sheffield) and Dark Lantern (Munich, 2019).
A catalogue will be produced with writings from Darian Leader and Vanessa Boni.