Bracha L. Ettinger

Bracha L. Ettinger (b. 1948, Tel Aviv) is a painter who works in both Paris and Tel Aviv. An internationally renowned visual artis­t who has been showing in major museums of modern and contemporary art, and a distinguished thinker, Bracha L. Ettinger is also one of the world’s leading  theorists in the realm of art and philosophy of aesthetics, ethics, sexual difference and French psychoanalysis and feminism, whose writings have influenced film and literary thinking, queer studies, contemporary aesthetics and ethics, and art history.

In parallel to painting and drawing engaged in abstract questions of color and light intermingled with the subject-matter of personal and historical  trauma, Bracha developed a series of concepts for rethinking subject and object and the unconscious, including the matrixial time, matrixial space and gaze, transubjectivity and metramorphosis, which led to a new understanding of both the feminine and the human subject. Several monographs are devoted to her work, including Art as Compassion edited by Griselda Pollock and Catherine de Zegher. Bracha is the “Marcel Duchamp” Chair and Professor of Psychoanalysis and Art at the EGS (Saas-Fee), faculty  at GCAS, training psychoanalyst at TAICP, member of the Lacanian WAP and NLS, and an activist in the Physicians for Human Rights. She is the author of a long series of articles and as well as few books including Matrix,  Halal(a) – Lapsus, Notes on Painting 1985-1992 (MOMA Oxford, 1993), The Matrixial Borderspace (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006) and And My Heart Wound-space (14th Istanbul Biennia and Wild Pansy Press, Leeds, 2015).

In 2017, Bracha L. Ettinger is participating in the Colori exhibition at the GAM museum, Torino, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and is preparing a solo show at the Silesian Museum in Katowice. In 2015 she has participated in the 14th Istanbul Biennial, where a large room was devoted to her oil paintings and notebooks. Additional significant solo exhibitions include Musée des Beaux-Arts (1988, Calais), Le Nouveau Musée (1992, Villeurbanne), MoMA (1993, Oxford), Israel Museum (1995, Jerusalem), Museum of Art (1997, Pori), BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Arts (2000, Brussels), The Drawing Center (2001, New York), Freud Museum (2009, London), Fundació Antoni Tàpies (2010, Barcelona),  Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers (2011, Paris), Casco (2012, Utrecht), Museum of the City of St. Petersburg at Peter and Paul Fortress (2013, St Petersburg), Museo Leopoldo Flores (2014, Toluca).

Bracha L. Ettinger’s group exhibitions include Whitechapel (1996, London), Institute of Contemporary Art (1996, Boston), National Museum for Women in the Arts (1996, Washington DC), Centre Pompidou (1997, Paris), Stedelijk Museum (1997, Amsterdam), Villa Medici (1999, Rome), KIASMA Museum (2006, Helsinki), ARS06 Biennial,  Centre Pompidou (2011, Paris), Museum of Modern Art (2014, Warsaw).

Her paintings are in important collections including Castello di Rivoli (Torino), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Haifa Museum of Art (Haifa), Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers (Angers), Israel Museum and Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Tel Aviv).