Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (; born 23 March 1948) is an Israeli-French artist, writer, psychoanalyst and philosopher based in France. Born in Mandatory Palestine, she lives and works in Paris. She is a feminist theorist and artist in contemporary New European Painting who invented the concepts of the matrixial space and matrixial gaze and related concepts around trauma, aesthetics and ethics.Bracha L. Ettinger, "Matrix and Metramorphosis", Differences. Vol. 4, nº 3, 1992.Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace. (Essays from 1994 to 1999). University of Minnesota Press, 2006Bracha L. Ettinger, Régard et éspace-de-bord matrixiels. Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 1999.Bracha L. Ettinger, Proto-ética matricial. Psychoanalytical writings from the 1990s. Spanish Edition translated and Introduced by Julian Gutierrez Albilla (Gedisa 2019)Bracha L. Ettinger, "Diotima and the Matrixial Transference." In: Van der Merwe, C. N., and Viljoen, H., eds. Across the Threshold. New York: Peter Lang, 2007; Bracha L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics. Vol 1: 1990-2000. Selected papers from the 1990s edited with Introduction by Griselda Pollock. Pelgrave Macmillan (2020). Ettinger is a professor at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and at GCAS, Dublin. In 2023, she was part of the Finding Committee for the artistic director of Documenta's 2027 edition.Alex Greenberger (30 March 2023), Documenta Kicks Off Search for Artistic Director of 2027 Edition ARTnews. Accessed 5 April 2024. She resigned from that role with a public letter intended to open a radical discussion in the artworld, following the administration's rejection of her request for a pause due to the attacks on civilians in Israel and in Gaza and the ongoing heavy losses of life.
Life and work Bracha Lichtenberg was born to Jewish-Polish Holocaust survivors in Tel Aviv on 23 March 1948. She received her M.A. in Clinical Psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she worked as research assistant for, then as personal assistant of, Amos Tversky (1969/70, 1973/74, 1974/75) and Danny Kahneman (1970/71). She moved to London for 4 years where she studied, trained, and worked between 1975 and 1979 at the London Centre for Psychotherapy (with Elsa Seglow), the Tavistock Clinic, and the Philadelphia Association (with R. D. Laing) and became a British citizen. She married Loni Ettinger in 1975 and divorced him in 1981; her daughter, the actress Lana Ettinger,Interview (in Hebrew) with Lana Ettinger, haaretz.co.il. Accessed 5 April 2024. was born in London.
Ettinger returned to Israel in 1979 and worked at Shalvata Hospital. She has painted and drawn since early childhood, self-taught. In her early days she avoided the art scene. In 1981, she divorced her first husband, decided to become a professional artist and moved to Paris where she lived and worked from 1981 onward. Her son, Itai Toker, was born in 1988. She works between Paris and Tel Aviv since 2003. As well as painting, drawing, artist-books (notebooks) and photography, she began writing her theory of the matrixial space in ethics, aesthetics and psychoanalysis, and received a D.E.A. in Psychoanalysis from the University Paris VII Diderot in 1987, and a Ph.D. in Aesthetics of Art from the University of Paris VIII in 1996.
Ettinger had a solo project at the Pompidou Centre in 1987, and a solo exhibition at the Museum of Calais in 1988. In 1995, she had a solo exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and in 1996 she participated in the Contemporary art section of Face à l'Histoire. 1933–1996 exhibition in the Pompidou Centre.Face à l'Histoire. 1933–1996. Paris: Flammarion and Centre Georges Pompidou (1996); In 2000, she had a mid-life retrospective at the Centre for Fine Arts (The Palais des Beaux Arts) in Brussels, and in 2001 a solo exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York.Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Eurydice Series. Edited by Catherine de Zegher and Brian Massumi. Drawing Papers, n.24. NY: The Drawing Center, 2001. With texts by Judith Butler, Bracha Ettinger, Adrien Rifkin and the editors, and including a conversation between the Bracha Ettinger and Creigie Horsfield. She continued to train as a psychoanalyst with Françoise Dolto, Piera Auglanier, Pierre Fedida, and Jacques-Alain Miller, and became an influential contemporary French feminist.Couze Venn, in: Theory, Culture and Society. Vol. 21 (1), 2004.Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard (ed.s), Laughing with Medusa. Oxford University Press; Humm, Maggie, Modernist Women and Visual Cultures. Rutgers University Press (2003); Humm, Maggie, Feminism and Film. Indiana University Press (1997); Her recent solo shows include Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2024 and Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2022. Ettinger had solo exhibitions in major museums like the Tapies Foundation in Barcelona, Moma in Oxford, The Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, the Museum of Angers and more.
Around 1988, Ettinger began her Conversation and Photography project. In 1981 she began her singular poetic art notebooks projectBracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Matrix. Halal(a) — Lapsus. Notes on Painting. Oxford: MOMA (1993); Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Artworking 1985–1999, with a reprint of Notes on Painting. Ludion: Ghent-Amsterdam, and Brussels: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000; which have become source for her theoretical writing. Her art has inspired historian Griselda Pollock, international curator Catherine de Zegher, and philosophers Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Brian Massumi, who dedicated a number of essays to her painting.Brian Massumi, "Painting: The voice of the grain" in Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, University of Minnesota Press, 2006Jean-François Lyotard, "Diffracted Traces / Anima Minima, Matrix - Halala Autistwork, Israel Museum, 1995 and in: Noam Sigal, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Radicants / Le press du reel, Paris, 2022Jean-François Lyotard, "Anamnesis", in Noam Sigal (ed.), Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Radicants / Le press du reel, Paris, 2022Christine Buci-Glucksmann, "Inner space of painting", Halala - autistwork, Israel Museum 1995Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum, Routledge, 2007Catherine de Zegher, Women's Work is Never Done, Ghent: Mer. Papers Kunsthalle, 2015de Zegher, Catherine and Pollock, Griselda, eds. Art as Compassion, Ghent: Mer. Papers Kunsthalle, 2011.de Zegher, Catherine, Inside the Visible, MIT Press, 1996.
Based mainly in Paris, Ettinger was visiting professor (1997–1998) and then research professor (1999–2004) in psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. Since 2001, she has been visiting professor in Psychoanalysis and Aesthetics at the AHRC Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (now CentreCATH).AHRC Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History AHRC B.Ettinger page. She was a lecturer at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem between 2023 and 2006, when she became chair and Professor at the EGS. She founded the matrixial theory in psychoanalysis.Bracha L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics. Vol I: 1990-2000. Edited by Griselda Pollock, Pelgrave-Macmillan, 2020.
Artistic career
Ettinger's art engages in the subjects of trauma, mothers and women during the Shoah and during wars, as well as the feminine in mythology: Eurydice, Medusa, Demeter, Persephone, and matrixial Eros. Her abstract research in painting concerns light and space, which follows Monet and Rothko.Manning, Erin. "Vertiginious Before the Light", Art as Compassion. MER Paper Kunsthalle, 2011.Benjamin, Andrew. "Lighting, Colouring, Workin" in Bracha L. Ettinger. And My Heart Wound-Space. Leeds: Wild Pansy Press, 2015; Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. "Images of Absence in the Inner Space of Painting", Inside the Visible. MIT Press, 1996. Her subjects concern the human condition and the tragedy of war, and her work in this aspect joins artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Francisco Goya.Kinsella, Tina, "Sundering the Spell of Visibility", and Pollock Griselda, "Between Painting and the Digital" in Bracha L. Ettinger. A. And My Heart Wound-Space. Leeds: Wild Pansy Press, 2015; . 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, Emma Kunz and Hilma af Klint.Pollock, Griselda. "Agnes Dreaming: Dreaming Agnes", and Bracha L. Ettinger "The Art-and-Healing Oeuvre" in 3 x Abstraction. Yale University Press, 2005.Pollock, Griselda,Art in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration: Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud and Bracha L. Ettinger in the Freud Museum. Leeds: Wild Pansy Press and London: Freud Museum (2013) Her notebooks accompany the painting process but are equally artworks.Nicolas Bourriaud, Bracha Ettinger: Off [hors] Figures, in: Bracha L. Ettinger - And My Heart Wound-Space. Leeds: Wild Pansy Press and 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015)
From 1981 to 1992, her 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 a few parallel series that spread over time like "Matrix — Family Album", "Autistwork" and "Eurydice", with themes of transgenerational transmission of personal and historical trauma, traces of memory and remnants of oblivion, the passage from pain to beauty Shoah and the World Wars,Griselda Pollock. Between painting and the Digital, in: Bracha L. Ettinger - And My Heart Wound-space. Leeds: Wild Pansy Press and 14th Istanbul Biennial, 2015; Griselda Pollock, After-affects - After-images. Manchester University Press, 2013; Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. the gaze, light, color and the space,Bracha L. Ettinger, Translucent Fore-images. Glowing through painting. In: Colori. Curator and Editor: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Castello di Rivoli, Museum of Modern Art, Turin, 2017; female body, womanhood and maternality, inspired by classical painting and creating an abstract space where the questions of beautyTina Kinsella, Sundering the Spell of Visibility, in: Bracha L. Ettinger: And My Heart Wound-space. Leeds: Wild Pansy Press and 14th Istanbul Biennial, 2015. and sublime are renewed for our time.Jean-Francois Lyotard, Writing on Contemporary Art and Artists. Leuven University Press, 2012;