DAS UNHEIMLICHE - Sigmund Freud und die Kunst | Vienna Art Week 2026

Vienna Art Week

From April 26 to November 4, the Sigmund Freud Museum focuses on the “uncanny”. The art exhibition in Berggasse 19 approaches this emotion, which once aroused Sigmund Freud’s interest, with selected positions. In his writing “The Uncanny”, published in 1919, the psychoanalyst once again referred to the ability of the arts to give expression to psychological experience. The works of contemporary art on display open up a range of perspectives reflecting Freud’s insight. He traces the uncanny back to its German etymological roots: heimisch: the familiar or homely as well as heimlich: the concealed or something that has been repressed into the unconscious.

In the works of Louise Bourgeois, Heidi Bucher, Gregory Crewdson, Birgit Jürgenssen, Helmut Newton, Hans Op de Beeck, Stephanie Pflaum (at the Showroom Berggasse 19), Markus Schinwald, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Kay Walkowiak and Francesca Woodman, we encounter the uncanny in metaphorical compositions of deformed or exposed bodies as well as in enigmatic stagings that often reveal the horror on a second glance. The “veiled character” of the uncanny emotion, to which Freud attached particular importance in his analysis, also characterizes many of the artistic compositions.

The works enter into a dialog with the exhibition venue, which carries the uncanny in its history given the expulsion of the Freud family in 1938 and the subsequent internment of Jewish inhabitants of Vienna at Berggasse 19 by the Nazi regime. In addition, the art show deals with themes that Freud once explored in theory and practice on site: doppelgängers, fetishism, dreams, traumas and the return of the repressed, as well as a critical reappraisal of traditional views on female sexuality and gender categories.

The exhibition “THE UNCANNY” at the Sigmund Freud Museum – the second part of the cooperation “Inner Worlds. Sigmund Freud and Art” with Kunsthalle Tuebingen – was curated by Monika Pessler (Director Sigmund Freud Museum) and Dr. Nicole Fritz (Director Kunsthalle Tuebingen).

ART SPACE

Berggasse 19, 1090 Wien

freud-museum.at

+43 1 319 15 96-11

office@freud-museum.at

Sigmund Freud Museum

Vienna IX, Berggasse 19. This is the address where Sigmund Freud lived and worked for 47 years until he was forced to flee from the Nazi regime in 1938. In 1971 , the Sigmund Freud Museum was founded here, and after extensive renovation and expansion reopened in 2020. Three permanent exhibitions in Freud’s former living and office rooms, an art presentation in the Showroom Berggasse 19 as well as special exhibitions present Freud’s multi-layered cultural legacy: they are dedicated to his life and work, the development of psychoanalysis in theory and practice, and its importance for the fields of society, science, and art. The history of the house at Berggasse 19 and the fates of its occupants are also brought into focus.