Art as Compassion: Bracha L. Ettinger

As an artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha L. Ettinger (Israel, France) incorporates both practices in her work in order to develop an innovative approach to applied psychoanalysis, half-way between the artistic and therapeutic practices; but as an artist, her paintings, drawings, notebooks and installations have influenced both the field of contemporary art and the field of art-history and research over the last two decades. In her work on paper, Ettinger imprints marks linked to memory and trauma, exile and history, while reflecting on representation, the gaze and the trace. The exchange of experiences and the desire to express a common and shared unconscious manifest themselves in her drawings and painting through the absence of fixation and a tendency to ambiguity, permutation and that which is compound, flexible and ephemeral.