Steig auf die Gebirge

“Climb the mountains, I tell you, and eat strawberries.” Sigmund Freud wrote this sentence in 1873, at the age of seventeen, to his school friend Eduard Silberstein. The mountains stand for the wasteland, the desert, the uncivilised world beyond urban confusion, in which the ego can find itself. Sigmund Freud advises his friend to break away from the impositions of the everyday, the interpersonal. Even before he develops his psychology of art, he sees the uncivilised world far from urban confusion and temptation as a possibility for self-discovery.
The exhibition at the FOTOHOF, put together to mark the 150th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s birth, explores the model of sublimation as a driving force for artistic expression and discusses the problems of substitution, projection and imagination in relation to contemporary art.
The advice of the youthful Freud to seek both asceticism and pleasure is the starting point for the selection of international positions of contemporary art. The artistic works, some of which were commissioned for this exhibition, thematise imponderables, longings and conflicts as motifs for a life that designs images in order to find itself in images.