Jane McAdam Freud: An Absent Presence
Retrospective in Dialogue with Louise Bourgeois and Holly Stevenson
Gazelli Art House, London
July 4 – September 6, 2025
This summer, Gazelli Art House in London stages An Absent Presence, the first retrospective of Jane McAdam Freud’s work since her death in August 2022, showcasing the quietly powerful emotional interiority of her art. Drawing on the formative influence of both her father, Lucian Freud, and her great‑grandfather, Sigmund Freud, this exhibition “presents key pieces from across her career” and probes the liminal zones where psyche and material intertwine.
McAdam Freud, born in 1958 and trained at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, was driven by an obsession with life, death, and libido. Her practice spanned intimate medals and clay works to ambitious installations in wire and found objects. As she remarked, she worked “at the edges where art and psychoanalysis meet.” The exhibition underscores how Jane used humour and formal rigor to render the immaterial, insisting that her work exists in the ether before—and beyond—her own physical presence.
Central to the show is the concept of the titular “absent presence”—the idea that artworks hold an autonomous, enduring energy. Jane herself described it: “it came before me and goes on after me, it doesn’t live and die as flesh does.” This conviction resonates with Louise Bourgeois, whose drawing, defined as “thought feathers… ideas that I seize in mid‑flight” underscores the shared preoccupation with process and psyche.
The exhibition also brings the work of Holly Stevenson, a ceramicist born in 1975, into direct dialogue with McAdam Freud. Stevenson’s recent 2024 ceramic pieces, exhibited alongside Jane’s, reflect psychoanalytic themes through textiles, glazes, and velvet. This three‑generation rhythm links McAdam Freud, Stevenson, and Bourgeois in a triad of female voices thoughtfully reworking motifs of domesticity, word play, and mortality.
Among the highlights is Poetic Encounter (2014–15), a steel‑wire sculpture evocative of mother and child forms, recalling Jane’s earlier Mother Mould exhibition at Gazelli in 2015. Other works, such as Breadbook (2015– 16), Distressed Green Box (2015–16), and Alien (2019), emphasize her material inventiveness and idiosyncratic wit. Through these pieces, one registers the sculptor’s investigation of emotional inheritance and the unconscious.
Finally, the show reinforces Jane McAdam Freud’s longstanding meditation on art as catharsis. She distinguished therapy—“talking it all out”—from art-making, which is about “feeling it all out.” In her hands, the object becomes a vessel for trauma, ancestry, and desire. In this London exhibition, her forms linger as both presence and absence—as if the artist herself continues to speak through the objects she shaped.