LONDON.- Invitation to Frequent the Shadows is a new exhibition by Bettina von Zwehl that quietly infiltrates the Freud Museum with the delicate small silhouettes of a young girl, shadowy portraits of women and an immersive light installation. Von Zwehl is the first artist to respond directly to Anna Freud’s archive. Freud was a pioneering child psychoanalyst and youngest daughter of Sigmund. She lived for forty-four years in the house that is now the Freud Museum.

Central to Invitation to Frequent the Shadows is The Sessions (2016), fifty framed fragments of the same profile of the same six-year old girl dispersed across the walls surrounding the large central staircase of the Museum. Individually tearing and shaping each piece of photographic paper, von Zwehl exposed and developed the images on the fragments to both reveal and obscure partial views of her subject. The Sessions collectively refers to the length of a psychoanalytic session and the time von Zwehl spent taking the young girl’s portrait, as well as the artist’s many sessions in the darkroom as she sought the essence of both image and subject.

In Sigmund Freud’s study with its iconic couch and his remarkable collection of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Oriental antiquities, von Zwehl evokes a startling transformation of the visually complex space with Safelight (2016). Illuminated by a dark red glow, the room takes on a new atmosphere, alluding perhaps to the ‘safelight’ of the photographic darkroom or the functionality of vision itself.

Inhabiting one of the Museum’s upstairs rooms, and inspired by Anna Freud’s lifetime of close female friendships, von Zwehl presents Laments (2014), three portraits from a series of fifteen black and white compositions of individual silhouetted female forms. The images again offer only a partial view of the women, who turn to the side or away from the camera completely, elusive and melancholic. Laments is accompanied by an arrangement of some of Freud’s belongings, selected by the artist.

Invitation to Frequent the Shadows has evolved from a residency undertaken by von Zwehl at the Freud Museum from 2013 to 2014 and her extensive research and reflection on the life and legacy of Anna Freud. The exhibition is also a homage to the artist’s closest friend, Natalie Ciletti, a child psychoanalyst who died tragically in 2009.

Bettina von Zwehl is best known for her subtle, distinctive photographic portraits. She has continued to seek out different ways of exploring the form; from her early works, most often defined by the exacting conditions she imposed on her subjects, to more recent projects which reprise the tradition of the painted portrait miniature. Her ongoing pre-occupation with the miniature was inspired during a residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in 2011. She has exhibited internationally, and her work is in held in collections worldwide.

Invitation to Frequent the Shadows is accompanied by Lament, a new publication by Art/Books, with two series of images by Bettina von Zwehl and new writing by psychoanalyst Josh Cohen. Cohen’s two texts are interwoven amongst the images, one a critical reflection on light and shadow, the other a poetic tale inspired by the torn photographs.