Bracha L. Ettinger

Biography

On 21 October 1967 the Egyptian navy sank the Israeli destroyer Eilat near Port Said. That night Bracha Lichtenberg was on duty in the operations room of the Al-Arish air base. She received the ship’s distress signals and began organising a rescue operation. According to her own account and to Israeli press reports, she sent aircraft and helicopters into the air, coordinated the evacuation of the wounded and had a field hospital set up at the base. During the operation a burning helicopter crashed beside her, she was wounded, and she later suffered combat shock.

The Israeli Air Force made this act public only half a century later. In August 2020 the Air Force commander presented her with a commendation medal, “Above and Beyond”.

She was born on 23 March 1948 in Tel Aviv, to Polish-Jewish parents who had survived the Holocaust. She grew up in the south of the city, in the Kiryat Shalom neighbourhood, and drew from early childhood. She had no formal art training and calls herself self-taught. After her army service she studied psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and took a master’s degree in clinical psychology. She worked there as a research assistant and then as personal assistant to Amos Tversky (in 1969–1970 and 1973–1975) and to Daniel Kahneman (in 1970–1971).

In 1975 she moved to London. Until 1979 she studied and worked at the London Centre for Psychotherapy, as well as at the Tavistock Clinic and at the Philadelphia Association of Ronald David Laing, and she became a British citizen. Her daughter, the future actress Lana Ettinger, was born in London. In 1979 Ettinger returned to Israel and worked at Shalvata Hospital. For the first years after that she kept away from the art scene.

In 1981 she decided to become a professional artist and moved to Paris. In 1988 her son Itai was born. Alongside painting she wrote and studied psychoanalysis: in 1987 she received a postgraduate diploma (DEA) in psychoanalysis from the University of Paris VII (Diderot), and in 1996 she defended a doctoral thesis in the aesthetics of art at the University of Paris VIII. Among her teachers in psychoanalysis are named Laing, Françoise Dolto, Pierre Fédida, Jacques-Alain Miller and Piera Aulagnier.

From 1981 to 1992 her work consisted chiefly of drawings and mixed media on paper, together with notebooks and artist’s books in which she entered theoretical notes, conversations and ink drawings. Since 1992, apart from the notebooks, she has worked mainly in oil and mixed media, in series: “Matrix — Family Album”, “Autistwork” and “Eurydice”. Their recurring themes are the transmission of trauma between generations, memory and oblivion, motherhood and the female body, the Holocaust and the world wars. Later came the figures of Medusa, Demeter and Persephone and the subjects of the Pietà and the Kaddish. Her sources are archival materials: aerial photographs and topographic maps of Israel, family albums, photographs of mothers with infants. The images are run through a photocopier and then reworked in paint. It seems telling to me that she herself calls her notebooks artworks on a par with her canvases.

From about 1985 in the notebooks, and from 1991–1992 in academic publications, she developed the concepts of the “matrixial space” and the “matrixial gaze” (from the Latin word meaning “womb”). The theory describes the feminine, maternal and prenatal dimension of the unconscious as a source of ethics and aesthetics. Her main book, “The Matrixial Borderspace”, appeared in French in 1999 and in English in 2006. She is named among the leading figures of contemporary French feminism and feminist psychoanalysis, alongside Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. The journal “Theory, Culture & Society” devoted an issue to her in 2004. She held conversations, recorded together with portrait photographs, with Emmanuel Levinas, Edmond Jabès, Christian Boltanski and Félix Guattari, and Jean-François Lyotard wrote two essays on her painting.

Her solo exhibitions include a project at the Centre Pompidou (1987), the Museum of Calais (1988), the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (1995), a retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (2000), the Drawing Center in New York (2001), the Freud Museum in London (2009), the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona (2010) and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Angers (2011). Her work was shown at the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015) and at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India (2018), and at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin (from 2021). In 2024 the exhibition “Eurydice – Kaddish – Pietà” opened at the Centre Pompidou. She has also been awarded the Israeli Becky Dekel Prize (sources differ between 2024 and 2025).

From 1997 to 2004 she taught psychoanalysis and aesthetics at the University of Leeds, and later at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Since 2003 she has worked between Paris and Tel Aviv, and until 2006 she taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.