Marcel Odenbach at the Freud Museum

The Freud Museum in London is celebrating opening it's doors to the public for 25 years on the 28th July. Part of the quarter centenary celebrations include an exhibition of work by renowned German video artist Marcel Odenbach.

Odenbach started out studying Architecture in Aachen from 1974 until 1979 (planning a PhD under the art historian Hans Holländer on traveller's and explorer's images of foreign countries). He started to order his thoughts and ideas onto vast lengths of paper and he famously wrapped himself in a 22-metre length of paper, a collage of drawings, texts and sketches, that covered his body from head to toe. Odenbach has since become a well-established and internationally successful video artist, along with other German artists such as Ulrike Rosenbach and Klaus vom Bruch.

The exhibition at the Freud Museum is titled Probeliegen, exploring European history with reference to it's murky past and experiments with the symbols associated with Sigmund Freud's famous consulting couch. It draws themes from the history of Jews in Germany and includes a study of the Majdenek Mausoleum at the Polish concentration camp. Odenbach's collages will stand against the couch, which was moved over to England from Vienna following Freud's escape during Nazi persecution in 1938. The exhibition tries to explore Germany's unconscious, in a similar way that Freud uncovered the subconscious of his patients with the use of his couch. As Odenbach explains; "Vision and the trauma, and subconscious is becoming in this work, the outside and the surface of the patient. The couch of Freud might be like a self-portrait of the artist. In this paperwork I am reflecting the art, sexuality and the colonial history of the European society in the 19th and 20th century, that is momentarily grappling with its self-image."

Images: Dazed and Confused