BRACHA L. ETTINGER

RADICANTS is pleased to inaugurate its new space RADICANT PARIS with an exhibition dedicated to the artist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger curated by Noam Segal.

How does one start to talk about an artist whose work contests the very concept of the beginning? For the painter, writer, and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger the notion of origin—a singular, temporally, and geographically bounded event—needs to be interrogated. Every subject’s «origin» consists of an accumulation of the material, political, and emotional parts of a life lived in time: trauma, memory, language, breast milk, water, soil, oxytocin, ashes, bodily arousal, and other transgenerational transmissions.

Ettinger formulated this matrix(ial) understanding of origin as a therapeutic modality and philosophy. It is evident in Ettinger’s artistic work as a form of spatial, temporal, and subjective ordering and understanding. Her way of working aligns with how she approaches the human subject and psyche–as an entity that shifts and changes as it moves through matrixial time and space.

This exhibition includes oil paintings from several series that embody matrixial connectivity: Eurydice, Eros, Pieta, Medusa, Annunciation, Birthing, and Angel of Carriance. They cross, co-emerge, reappear, and trans-present in one another. The show also includes drawings and notebooks.

Bracha L. Ettinger’s works are at the forefront of contemporary painting. Yet, like many of her female contemporaries, the radical capacities of her practice are only beginning to find recognition.

The exhibition is accompanied by a book, which compiles texts by Segal as well as writings by the American art historian Amelia Jones, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and chef Precious Okoyomon in conversation with the artist. This book is published by Radicants and distributed in France by Les Presses du Réel and internationally by Idea Books.