BRACHA L. ETTINGER
The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is the first German institution to present an overview of the groundbreaking work of the painter, psychoanalyst, philosopher and peace activist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (BRACHA), who was born in Tel Aviv in 1948. While her theory of the matrixial gaze has been widely received in art and academia, and her works are collected and discussed internationally, BRACHA first attracted widespread attention in Germany after she resigned from the selection committee for the artistic direction of documenta 16—in part because the daughter of Holocaust survivors had not felt able to exhibit in Germany for forty years.
The exhibition includes her most recent paintings, examples of her early work from the 1980s, and artist’s books in which BRACHA comments on current events in drawings and ink painting. Early on, BRACHA used the photocopier to create images, mixed ashes into pigments, and explored the possibility of reproducing documents of mass murder. In her paintings, which evolve over a period of four to nine years in an unconscious process, female victims of the Shoah encounter figures from ancient myths. BRACHA’s art focuses on the vulnerability and the interdependence of all life. In doing so, she inspires a younger generation of artists interested in inherited trauma and healing. BRACHA’s ethical and aesthetic program pointes the way out of the destructive black-and-white logic of today’s algorithm-driven conflicts and opens up new for humanity, compassion, and openness to the future.
The exhibition Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is supported by Artis, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and High Art, Paris. Media Partner of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia