The aesthetical moment that works to enhance the emergence of a future ethical moment plays on a virtual string.¹

She is seemingly crazy — but is she? Or is the world chaotic, or simply overwhelming for her, she who is expecting death, watching horror, accepting death, being abandoned, between, two deaths, intensive and helpless. She doesn’t want to look at us. She looks at us. She looks away.²

Time is pregnant with the impression of loss.³

Pigment is light, not just color or matter, and stains and lines as diagrams and figuralities that steam from obstruction, that steam themselves from images with which I must leave and which correspond to the working process but give rise to further thoughts to affects event, visual or not, that con-cern us.⁴

The world is bleeding
the earth is weeping
the sky is polluted
and the waters are drying
and the whole nature tries to tell us this, and how can we listen — and in all this, humankind are stupefied and testified and behave like children.⁵

It is not about going back, but about imagining a universe constructed differently, with this experience, in the present, without giving in to the invasion of images that constantly bombard us to the point of nihilism.⁶

Painting pains me. And it will pain you. We join in sorrow so that silenced violence
will find its echo in our spirit, not by imagination but by artistic vision. After an earth-shattering catastrophe, must I not allow the traces of the horrifying to interfere with my artwork? Why should this be any different to psychoanalytical and critical interventions?⁷

Art proceeds by trusting in the human capacity to contain and convey its rage and its pain, and to transform residuals of violence into ethical relations via new forms of mediation that give birth to their own beauty and define them. It is to trust that we will be able to bear in compassion the unbearable, the horrible and the inhuman in the human. Critique is not lost in this artistic entrustment. Rather, critique becomes participatory in it.⁸

The intimate and the anonymous participate together in the creation of a multiple subjectivity. They have the same unconscious weight.⁹

In my process, the abstract universe encounters the one we live in—a world absorbed by pain and violence—and offers itself up to it in a kind of trust after the end of trust.¹⁰

High Art is delighted to present Trust After the End of Trust, BRACHA L. Ettinger’s inaugural solo show at the gallery, on view in Paris at 1 rue Fromentin from October 14th through December 1st, 2024. The opening reception will take place on October 14th from 6-9pm.

BRACHA L. Ettinger’s (b. 1947) paintings and drawings are obtained through multifold layers of pigment, ash, dots and fine lines, in a durational process that can span through several years. For the artist, writer, psychoanalyst and teacher, painting presents an occasion to transform the remnants of a beleaguered historical past into a transhistorical field of compassion. Traces of sighs and tears, semaphores of deep emotion, are re-inscribed onto canvas as forms of delicate and fragile communication. The artist connects to transgenerational memories culled from both a personal and a collective consciousness to transpire themes of maternality, non-abandonment, and care. She invites the viewer to perceive these fields of empathy as a kind of depth-space and as a passageway towards a productive ‘transubjectivity’. The diffracted feminine subject at its core existing as a mother-figure and as an expansive space: a mental and physical holding zone. Understanding painting as equally an aesthetic and ethical gesture, BRACHA L. Ettinger’s oeuvre builds toward a visual language of lament and wonder. It is a monumental architecture of female sign language.

Solo exhibitions devoted to the artist have been presented by numerous international museums and biennials including: Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (ongoing); Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy (2021-23); Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, USA; Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Keraly, India; Silesian Museum, Katowice, Poland; 14th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers, France; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; BOZAR, Brussels, Belgium; The Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Drawing Center, New York, USA. Her work has been presented in numerous group museum exhibitions including: Art Museion, Bolzano, Italy; GAM, Turin, Italy; Bonnier Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; MAS/KMSKA Museums, Antwerp, Belgium; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. USA; Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel.

K21 museum in Dusseldorf will be presenting a major solo exhibition of Bracha L. Ettinger’s latest paintings and notebooks in spring of 2025.

Bracha L. Ettinger is the author of numerous articles and books on art, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and ethics including: The Matrixial Borderspace [essays 1994-1999], 2006; Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics, Vol 1:1990-2000, ed. G. Pollock, 2020; Regard et Espace-de-bord matrixial, 1999.

(1) Edited by Noam Segal. Textes de Nicolas Bourriaud, Amelia Jones, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Jean-François Lyotard, Precious Okoyomon, Noam Segal. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. Paris: Radicants, June 2022.

(2) Edited by Noam Segal. Textes de Nicolas Bourriaud, Amelia Jones, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Jean-François Lyotard, Precious Okoyomon, Noam Segal. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger. Paris: Radicants, June 2022.

(3) From Bracha’s notebook from 1989, exhibited at the Castello di Rivoli in 2021.

(4) From Bracha’s lecture at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, May 21, 2013.

(5) Bracha L. Ettinger, From various notebooks from 2019 to 2022.

(6) Bracha L. Ettinger, Interview with The Art Newspaper about the Radicants show, published 19.07.2022.

(7) Bracha L. Ettinger, The New York Times, 2016

(8) Bracha L. Ettinger, The New York Times, 2016

(9) Bracha L. Ettinger, Interview with the Nova Express, Nova Express Vol. 2, page 89, 2022.

(10) Bracha L. Ettinger as told to Annie Godfrey Larmon, published on Artforum.com, July 2018