At London’s Freud Museum, the artist Cathie Pilkington has made a ghostly intervention – The Artwork Newspaper

The Freud Museum in Hampstead, north London, is the place Sigmund Freud lived the final yr of his life—the daddy of psychoanalysis arriving together with his household in 1938, in poor health with most cancers and a refugee from Nazi persecution. It’s an intensely evocative place, made all of the extra distinctive by the museum’s coverage of inviting modern artists to answer it.

Despite the fact that they’d fled Vienna, the Freuds managed to convey a lot of their most valuable possessions to twenty Maresfield Gardens, most notably the contents of Sigmund’s examine and consulting room, together with his exceptional assortment of round 2,000 Roman, Egyptian, Chinese language and Mexican antiquities, and naturally his iconic psychoanalytic sofa. Immediately all of this stays precisely because it was in Freud’s day: books and artefacts crowd into cupboards and canopy each floor, with rows of historic figures densely organized throughout the big desk from the place, even in his closing months, Freud would write.

The home opened to the general public in 1986, and one of many first creative responses to its historical past and contents was Susan Hiller’s 1994 vitrine set up After the Freud Museum, now owned by the Tate and described by the artist as “a set of issues evoking cultural and historic factors of slippage: psychic, ethnic, sexual and political disturbances”. One other memorable artist-disturber was Sophie Calle, who in 1999 unfold her marriage ceremony costume throughout the hallowed sofa and slyly interspersed private keepsakes and intimate texts among the many museum’s reverentially preserved artefacts; and one other was Mark Wallinger, whose 2016 tackle Freudian notions of doubling and self-reflection concerned putting in a mirror throughout the whole ceiling of the examine.

I will even always remember Sarah Lucas’s Past the Pleasure Precept (2000), an exuberant exploration of the Freudian forces of Eros (want) and Thanatos (demise) which included slumping a mattress over a cardboard coffin in Freud’s bed room and staging a sexual congress between two of Freud’s eating room chairs, decked out in female and male underwear and conjoined by a fluorescent strip mild.

Now the museum is ushering in its sixtieth yr with one other radical collection of interventions. Housekeeper by the British artist Cathie Pilkington channels the largely missed determine of Paula Fichtl, the Freud household’s devoted housekeeper. Fichtl joined the family in Vienna as a maid in 1929 and remained of their service till Anna’s demise. One in every of her particular duties was the care of Freud’s library and beloved antiquities. “Paula is aware of her method round right here higher than all of us,” Freud would say. “For each tiny piece she is aware of the appropriate place.”

Unsettling exact order

Pilkington’s exhibition provides a brand new subversive company to this loyal servant. In Pilkington’s fingers, Fichtl takes on the persona of what she phrases a “housekeeper poltergeist”, who stealthily disrupts this hallowed shrine to psychoanalysis, unsettling the exact order of Freud’s artefacts and slyly inserting some disquieting new components.

Amid the objects in Freud’s examine it’s initially laborious to identify Pilkington’s sculptural interlopers. Peeping out from among the many collectible figurines on the desk is a polychrome statuette of a multi-breasted goddess with lengthy white socks and dainty crimson footwear, whereas on a mahogany plinth beforehand occupied by a Roman bust, one other miniature bare figurine strikes a pose in racy stilettos. A horse’s head and a faceless fur-collared feminine bust seem on a tabletop and disembodied plaster limbs nestle on folded blankets.

Within the eating room different new occupants proceed to feed into the Freudian ideas such because the uncanny (or unhomely). Pilkington’s 2003 sculpture Curio, for instance, contains a disconcertingly ageless lady who sits at a dressing desk piled with kitsch collectible figurines glazed a gleaming chocolate brown. Upstairs, refined subversion has been jettisoned, with Pilkington changing Freud’s bed room right into a dreamlike storeroom stuffed with an awesome mass of drawings, sculpture, discovered objects and works in progress.

A brand new work, Strata (2025), fills a whole wall with a glass case bursting with objects starting from feminine busts to random plaster and material limbs. A few of these are tucked between folds of packing blankets, the sediment-like layers of cloth chiming with the work’s geological title in addition to echoing Freud’s notion of the unconscious as an archaeological website, excavated by means of psychoanalysis.

By enjoying with conventions of storage, accumulation, curation and preservation—in addition to providing a number of analogies with Freudian archetypes, practices and theories—this sensible infiltration of the Freud Museum manages concurrently to destabilise and reanimate the Nice Man’s legacy. It’s no imply feat.

• Cathie Pilkington: Housekeeper, Freud Museum, London, till 1 March