Cathie Pilkington: Housekeeper

29 Oct 2025-22 Feb 2026

Overview

‘Paula Fichtl, the maid who had been with the Freud family since 1929 and had dusted his statuettes with supreme care in Vienna, now faithfully assigned them, as closely as she could from memory, the places they had once occupied.’
— Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time, 1988

Working with ghostly aspects of the museum as household, as collection and as archive, artist Cathie Pilkington channels the figure of Paula Fichtl, the Freud family’s live-in housekeeper. Through different modes of artistic inhabitation, which include the assigning of her own ‘antiquities’, Pilkington reinterprets Ficthl’s meticulous daily routines as sublimated forms of creativity and agency which reveal striking parallels between their two labours, across the 20th and 21st centuries.

The exhibition is guest-curated by Gemma Blackshaw, Professor of Art History at the RCA, and Inaugural Academic Associate of the Freud Museum.

A beautifully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Housekeeper has been made possible with the generous support of the Arts Council England Unlocking Collections grant and the Royal College of Art’s Research and Knowledge Exchange Dissemination Fund.

Cathie Pilkington is an artist whose work engages passionately and critically with the canonical history of figurative sculpture. Her work combines intensively modelled and painted sculptures within immersive installations comprising an array of diverse materials and studio furniture. As a sculptor and assembler her practice is porous, often absorbing and integrating content from archives, collections and historic settings. Her site-responsive installations are balanced ambivalently between chaos and precision and have been described as a kind of art historical fly-tipping. Recent situated projects include Exquisite Corpse (2024), the rehang of the cast collection at the Royal Academy’s Life Room, and Working from Home (2019), which made interventions in the display of the permanent collections of Dorich House Museum and Pallant House Gallery. Recent solo exhibitions include Rag & Bone, Kunstmuseum Brandts, Odense (2025-26) and Weird Horses, Karsten Schubert, London (2023). Recent awards include the Bridget Riley Fellowship, British School at Rome (2024) Born in Manchester in 1968, Cathie Pilkington lives and works in London. She has been The Keeper of the Royal Academy of Art London since 2019.