Sigmund Freud observed in ‘Medusa’s Head’ (1922) 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 through a selection of drawings, paintings and sculptures in dialogue with objects and artefacts throughout the Freud Museum.

A central theme of this project is mark making, most evident in drawing and the inscription of lines, which is connected to psychoanalysis through the act of uncovering traces of the past. For Freud, memory traces are not exact replicas of past events, but rather reconstructed versions of them. Similarly, mark making can be seen as a process of tracing forgotten or repressed memories, where the act of drawing becomes a means of revealing and grappling with hidden or altered experiences.

Drawing is central to both Brown and Weir’s practices, each creating complex and ambiguous visual spaces that appropriate images from art history. In Brown’s work, images appear and disappear, shifting between multiple perspectives. Faces and body parts merge, becoming both sexualised and visually playful. This resonates closely not only with the psychoanalytic emphasis on the hidden and the sexual, but with Freud’s exploration of dualism and his fascination with two-faced figures. Weir’s work similarly engages with the play of the seen and unseen, as well as the relationship between pain and creativity. Some drawings are made with the artist’s own blood, embodying the tension between life and death drives inherent in the very act of image-making.

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, which challenges what is often taken for granted or left unexamined. The Sight of Something shows how visual phenomena can evoke the complexities of human experience, drawing us into visual worlds that prompt introspection. These images are never fixed or absolute; like memory, they are constructed, layered, and distorted—shaped as much by absence and forgetting as by what is seen and remembered.

A catalogue will accompany the exhibition with an essay by Darian Leader.

The exhibition and publication are generously supported by The Brown Collection and Gagosian.