Memories of Vienna are seemingly inescapable at London’s Freud Museum. Gavin Turk, whose Wittgenstein’s Dream is the latest contemporary art intervention at the Hampstead house where Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life, says some of the works were originally inspired by and made for the birthplace of psychoanalysis. The centrepiece in Freud’s study, a life-size waxwork of another Viennese thinker, Ludwig Wittgenstein, first appeared in A Vision at Vienna’s Galerie Krinzinger in October. Planned as a two-man vehicle with fellow conceptualist Joseph Kosuth, the show riffed on “that fin-de-siècle moment” when “lots of very interesting figures would have all crossed paths,” Turk says. “Apparently Wittgenstein’s sister was a patient of Freud’s.” While Kosuth had to pull out of the Vienna show for a hip replacement, he will be joining Turk in London on 14 January for the first of the Freud Museum’s 30th anniversary talks. The conversation promises to be enlightening. “Joseph really is a Wittgenstein expert,” says Turk.
