LONDON.- The Freud Museum presents Martin Wilner’s first solo exhibition, drawing on his decades of artistic work pertinent to the practice and thinking around psychoanalysis. Wilner is an artist, psychiatrist and scholar in psychoanalysis based in New York.

The Case Histories are the latest iteration of Wilner’s ongoing Making History project begun in 2002. Throughout the first decade of this process, Wilner rendered daily drawings based upon events in the world of interest to him. Elements of representation, portraiture, caricature, cartography, typography, micrography, and musical composition coalesce into the resulting work.

Beginning in 2012 he began to bring the basic elements of psychoanalysis into the work process by inviting subjects to send him daily correspondence for month-long periods. As a psychiatrist and scholar in psychoanalysis, Wilner is uniquely suited to this unusual task. Together with pen and paper, a psychoanalytic examination of the relationship that develops throughout each intensive month-long correspondence directs and helps produce the resulting work.

The Case Histories includes the first two years of this project, representing a refinement of his two decades-long observational work practice. Subjects in these works include the composer John Zorn, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and his own former psychoanalyst, among many other fascinating individuals. Also presented are works from his other ongoing projects, Journal of Evidence Weekly and Game Pieces, giving context to the organic evolution of his psychoanalytic drawing practice.

In Journal of Evidence Weekly, Wilner works within the observational constraints of the New York City subway system to create an ongoing series of drawings, primarily in an accordion fold format to record and examine the ever-unfolding narrative of his daily journeys.

In Game Pieces, he deploys the structures and parameters of rule-bound games to create works that mine the spaces between chance and choice, conscious and unconscious. In Phrenology, the composition of a pseudoscience that claimed to map the characteristics of the mind becomes a game of self-analysis in the artist’s hands. Despite its being debunked, the notion that the mind could be functionally mapped anticipated Freud’s own topographical model of the mind, and brain mapping using fMRI and other current technologies in neuroscience today. As such, presenting Phrenology in Freud’s study creates an interesting conversation between seemingly archaic ideas of the past, filtering through Freud’s own contemplations on these matters into the present.

Martin Wilner (born 1959, New York City) has exhibited his work internationally and has been published extensively. In addition, he is a clinical psychiatrist, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and a Scholar in Psychoanalysis affiliated with the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

His work has been included in “Embracing Modernism” at the Morgan Library and Museum (New York City, 2015), “Day After Day” at the University Art Museum, University (Albany, New York, 2013), “Reinventing Ritual” at the Jewish Museum (New York City, 2009), and “Drawn to Detail” at the DeCordova Museum (Lincoln, Massachusetts, 2008).

His work is in many private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York City), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), the Morgan Library and Museum (New York City), the Jewish Museum (New York City), Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Fundação de Serralves (Porto), and the Vassar Art Library (Poughkeepsie).

He has been invited to speak about his work process at the Drawing Center (New York City), the Payne Whitney Clinic, Department of Psychiatry Grand Rounds (New York City), Shoreditch Club (London), and South By Southwest (Austin, Texas).

He is currently an Artist in Residence at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and works from his Case Histories are currently on show at the New Museum Los Gatos (California) as part of the exhibition Making Contact: SETI Artists in Residence.