Jess Jones-Berney takes in a kaleidoscope of colours at Marcel Odenbach's latest exhibition.
Considering Marcel Odenbach's past artistic endeavours have included self-mummification in paper collage and chair-encased television sets, I was intrigued to meet the artist for his latest show, Probeliegen, at the Freud Museum. And I'm pleased to say that Marcel is every bit as flamboyant as you'd imagine, his animated character in full bloom while discussing his latest project.
It's a meticulously crafted collage depicting Freud's illustrious couch, allowing you to take in its rich, autumnal tones and exquisite detail, the reality of which is somewhat lost under the subdued lighting of the office next door. You can also get right up close to the patterning, which isn't ordinarily possible, unless you 'do a Marcel' and scale the red rope to get a dashed shot with the couch, a performance I'm later treated to.
The German artist is quite the character, stifling giggles as the Freud Museum's alarm system kicks in, and later explaining to me quite matter-of-factly that “nobody else has the same colour sense as me.” It's a talent he credits to his mother's interior design background, as mixing colours came intrinsically, and it's a skill he's been able to fine-tune from youth. Probeliegen is a visual testament to this flair for colour; a kaleidoscope of velvety reds, caramel and golden hues with beech, maroon and ashen browns congregating in the darker areas.
But it's the multiplicity of layers linking Freud to Marcel within the piece that I find most intriguing, a series of connections the artist is keen to reiterate as we mosey about Freud's brick-a-brac office. “He was so obsessed with collecting things, and so am I,” Marcel enthuses, telling me about a hoarding habit that's remained with him from an early age. It's also a quirk that clearly informs his work, played out here in the collation of newspaper clippings, magazine articles and history pages used to create the fabric's quaint detail. On closer inspection each cushion's creased discolouration is made from interspersing personal ephemera with images of and relating to Freud's Jewish family history and his grandson Lucian's painterly obsession with the couch. Marcel tells me that this layered aesthetic also corresponds to overlapping journeys in Freud's own life, which took him from Berlin to Vienna, and finally London after fleeing Germany's annexation of Austria.
“My world as a teenager felt like a collage,” he adds, pointing to the elaborate layering of nostalgic images as a way of “discovering my own history”. Reflecting on the three and a half months it took to complete this assemblage couch, he likens the process of physically knitting together spontaneous decisions to a kind of personal therapy. “It was a mirror of my situation at the moment,” he recalls, as though his own manifestation of the neurologist's couch is somehow imbued with Freud's psychoanalytic qualities.
In the upstairs quarters of the Freud Museum, Marcel's fascination with fusing memory, history and personal narratives plays out in his film installation Turning Circles, in which the artist films Wiktor Tolkin's 1969 Majdanek Mausoleum at the concentration camp. To foreboding music, he traces the bomb-damaged indentations of the monuments exterior, a haunting view considering the dome holds the cremated ashes of victims, and an insight into Marcel's interest in the symbolism of architecture. Elsewhere in the room, personal artefacts from Freud's life are displayed; the coat, boots and umbrella he became synonymous with alongside his wedding ring and wedding menu and napkin rings.
It's a compelling exhibition in which Marcel effectively draws on the same sensitivities as Freud, interweaving personal stories with historical threads, which are themselves embedded in the fabric of the couch itself.
Probeliegen in on at Freud Museum until 26th June 2011.
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