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Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger

Angel of Carriance
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen

Insights into the Vulnerability of Existence

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, BRACHA for short (b. Tel Aviv, 1948; lives and works in Tel Aviv and Paris), is a painter, psychoanalyst, philosopher, and peace activist. Her theory of the matrixial gaze has attracted considerable attention from the art world and academia, and her work has been discussed in the international press and is held by collections in numerous countries. In Germany, however, BRACHA was largely unknown—in part because, as a daughter of Holocaust survivors, she had found it impossible for forty years to exhibit her work in the country—until she stepped down from the finding committee for the artistic direction of documenta 16. BRACHA was an early adopter of the photocopier as a compositional tool, mixed ashes with pigments, and interrogated documents that provided evidence of the mass murder with a view to their representability: in her paintings, women victims of the Shoah encounter female figures from ancient myth. Her ethical and aesthetic program opens up new spaces for interpersonal relations, compassion, and openness to our future.

Released on occasion of BRACHA’s first institutional exhibition in Germany at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, this publication presents a survey of her groundbreaking oeuvre. Her most recent paintings appear side by side with her early works from the 1980s, and selections from her manifold notebooks illustrate how the artist records her observations on current affairs in drawings and ink paintings. With a foreword by Susanne Gaensheimer, essays by Kolja Reichert and the artist as well as text fragments by Nicolas Bourriaud, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Rosi Huhn, Jean-François Lyotard, Brian Massumi, and Griselda Pollock.