Artist Cathie Pilkington draws attention to the invisible forms of labour involved in the care of the Museum's collection
‘Paula Fichtl, the maid who had been with the Freud family since 1929 and had dusted his statuettes with supreme care in Vienna, now faithfully assigned them, as closely as she could from memory, the places they had once occupied.’— Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time, 1988
Working with ghostly aspects of the museum as household, as collection and as archive, artist Cathie Pilkington channels the figure of Paula Fichtl, the Freud family’s live-in housekeeper. Through different modes of artistic inhabitation, which include the assigning of her own ‘antiquities’, Pilkington reinterprets Ficthl’s meticulous daily routines as sublimated forms of creativity and agency which reveal striking parallels between their two labours, across the 20th and 21st centuries.
The exhibition is guest-curated by Gemma Blackshaw, Professor of Art History at the RCA, and Inaugural Academic Associate of the Freud Museum.
Housekeeper has been made possible with the generous support of the Arts Council England Unlocking Collections grant and the Royal College of Art’s Research and Knowledge Exchange Dissemination Fund.
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