BRACHA’s Radical Poetics of Return

The paintings in Bracha L. Ettinger’s exhibition at K21 in Düsseldorf are intimate in scale, oscillating between abstraction and figuration. The viewer’s eye roams across sedimented canvases, grasping for concrete forms that always seem on the verge of surfacing. From behind veils of pigment – lilac purples, smoky greys, sudden reds, bruised pinks – faces emerge and gaze back at you. Is it the petrifying stare of Medusa or the eyes of Eurydice being pulled back into the abyss, as suggested by titles like Eurydice – Halala n.3 (2017–23) and Angel of Carriance – Medusa n.1 (2017–23)? Across more than forty years of practice, the Tel Aviv-born artist, known mononymously as BRACHA, confronts moments of violence drawn from both personal experience and collective memory, reworking them in a fluid space where colour and time merge. Over the course of several years, BRACHA repeatedly returns to each canvas, mirroring the fractured, recursive rhythms of trauma. In this slow, insistent process, the paintings become a vessel not only for memory, but for the possibility of compassion and healing.

Especially when shown in Germany, BRACHA’s work risks being narrowly interpreted through the lens of Holocaust remembrance, with pieces like Eurydice n.61 (2017–22) – a spectral assembly of female forms – read as a reparative invocation of Shoah victims. Perhaps this is one reason why the artist consciously avoided exhibiting here for so many years. While those histories are undeniably present in her work and biography as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, BRACHA does not centre her practice on a singular trauma, nor does she offer a superficial gesture of reparation. Instead, she proposes ways of engaging with unfathomable acts of violence – a notion rooted in her writings on psychoanalysis.

In texts such as The Matrixial Borderspace (2006), she pushes back against the dominant Western, phallocentric model of subjectivity, which defines selfhood through loss and sees birth as separation, likening our emergence into the world to the fall from paradise, championed by classic Freudian analysis. Instead, BRACHA draws from the matrixial state: the trans-subjective, pre-birth experience of co-emergence with the mother or, to borrow her own term, ‘m/Other’. This maternal state of carriance – of holding on and being held, like the canvas carrying many layers of paint – is at the core of the artist’s practice, where time, trauma and memory fold into one another, opening a space of return – not as an endpoint, but as part of a continual process of transformation.

In the luminous central room of the exhibition, flanked by two dimly lit spaces, hangs the Angel of Carriance n.1 (2017–21). The angel, hovering between figuration and transcendence, is another recurring presence in BRACHA’s work. In contrast to Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus in ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940) – a celestial figure based on Paul Klee’s eponymous painting from 1920, who is pushed backwards into the future, unable to intervene in the mounting disaster – BRACHA’s Angel of Carriance is far more active. The Angelus Novus might be compared with a camera. Both move away from what they stare at, whether spatially or temporally – as in the infamous photograph of women and children in Poland’s Mizoch Ghetto in 1942, taken just seconds before their execution, an often-cited source in BRACHA’s paintings. Unlike a photographer who ‘shoots’ and ‘captures’, the Angel of Carriance is, perhaps, a painter. She does not keep her distance but draws nearer, diving into the abyss to retrieve the faces of women from the depths of history and memory, retracing them through layers of paint and time. She moves in circular patterns, defying the winds that sweep Benjamin’s angel helplessly into the future. Holding onto the gazes she encounters, BRACHA’s angel resurfaces and plunges back in again, carrying with her all she can salvage.

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s exhibition is on view at K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, until 31 August 

_{Main image: ‘Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen; photograph: Achim Kukulies}