page_title: Bracha L. Ettinger
section_title: Artist
hierarchical_section_title: Bracha L. Ettinger / Artist
caption_attribution_description: English: Bracha_Ettinger,_Matrix_-_Family_Album_series,n.3,_2001, sample
context_page_description: Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is an Israeli-born French artist, visual analyst, psychoanalyst, philosopher, and writer.
  Ettinger's work consists mostly of oil painting and writing. Ettinger is now considered to be a prominent figure among both the French painters' and the Israeli art's scenes. Ettinger's art was recently analysed at length in the book Women Artists at the Millennium, in Griselda Pollock's Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum and in Catherine de Zegher's anthology Women's Work is Never Done. Her ideas in cultural theory, psychoanalysis, and French feminism achieved recognition after the publication of Matrix and Metramorphosis, fragments from her notebooks and The Matrixial Gaze. Over the last two decades her work has been influential in art history, film theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and gender studies.
  Ettinger is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
context_section_description: Ettinger's research concerns light and space, and in this it follows from Monet and Rothko. Her subjects concern the human condition and the tragedy of war, and her work in this aspect follows on after artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Francisco Goya. The painting process engages a space of passage between figures and abstraction, and her attitude to abstraction resonates with the spiritual concerns of Agnes Martin and Hilma af Klint. Another major subject in her work is the unconscious and in particular the feminine and the maternal. Her notebooks accompany the painting process but are equally art works.
  From 1981 until 1992, Ettinger's principal artwork consisted of drawing and mixed media on paper as well as notebooks and artist's books, where alongside theoretical work and conversations she made ink and wash painting and drawing. Since 1992, apart from her notebooks, most of her artwork consists of mixed media and oil paintings, with few parallel series that spread over time like: "Matrix — Family Album", "Autistwork" and "Eurydice", with themes of generational transmission of memory, personal and historical trauma, the Shoah and the World Wars, the gaze, light, color and the space, womanhood and maternality, inspired by classical painting and creating an abstract space where the questions of beauty and sublime become relevant for our time. Between 1984-2008, images that she obtains first by collage and xerox processing are abstracted in a long process of oil painting that takes a few years. From 2008 until now Ettinger works her oil paintings directly on canvas and doing video art films that contains her drawings and photographs.
  According to Griselda Pollock, Catherine de Zegher and Chris Dercon, director of the Tate Modern who had chosen her work for the contemporary art section of the Pompidou Center's major exhibition of 20th Century art Face à l'Histoire, Ettinger has become one of the major artists of the New European Painting. Along with painting she has worked on installations, theoretical research, lectures, video works, and "encounter events". Her paintings, photos, drawings, and notebooks have been exhibited at the Pompidou Centre (1987, 1996, 2010–2011), and the Stedelijk Museum in 1997. In the last decade, Ettinger's oil on canvas paintings involve figures like Medusa, Demeter and Persephone, and Eurydice. Though from 2010 onward her work still consists mainly of oil paintings and drawings, she is also doing new media animated video-films where the images are multi-layered like her painting. In 2015, Ettinger participated with a solo show in the 14th Istanbul Biennial drafted and curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. In 2018-2019 she participated with a solo show at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018 in India.
caption: Bracha Ettinger, Painting: Matrix — Family Album series n.3, 2001.
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "1728", "Image ImageLength": "2904", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "Canon", "Image Model": "Canon EOS 30D", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2007:09:08 18:40:12", "Image Artist": "unknown", "Image ExifOffset": "320", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "822", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5755", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "8", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Manual", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2007:09:06 14:49:35", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2007:09:06 14:49:35", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "5906891/1000000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "6", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "4", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Spot", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "84", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "400", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "672", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "233600/59", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "233600/59", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "2", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Manual Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}