Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Eurydice Series
Let’s go back to 2001 when we opened Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: Eurydice Series, the first U.S. solo exhibition of drawings by the Israeli artist and psychoanalyst. Ettinger’s enigmatic drawings were drawn from her ongoing Eurydice series, in which she addresses issues of exile, memory, human relationships, and history through layered images of photocopied archival photographs and screen-like veils of ink.
As an artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger had set out for herself the challenge of integrating both practices. The shifting experience between these two fields of experimentations and knowledge, and the blurring of boundaries between the self and the other were embodied in the Eurydice series. Since 1994, the artist made over thirty works in this moving series, creating barely discernible figures and faces by running the images through a photocopy machine and stopping the process halfway through. She would then mix the residual ink of the copy with oil paint to achieve textured images. The subject of her works were photographs from old family albums, newspapers articles on the Holocaust and aerial views from war archives. Lichtenberg Ettinger traced, through layers of mark upon mark, the sharing of “thought-with-feeling” as it belongs to no individual in particular.
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Eurydice No. 23, 1994-1998. Reworked photography with oil on paper, mounted on canvas, 29 x 51 cm.
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Family Album-Means of Transportation, 1988-1989. Mixed media with ink on paper, mounted on canvas, 40 x 160 cm.
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Eurydice No. 37, 1999-2001. Mixed media with oil on paper, mounted on canvas, 28 x 21.2 cm.
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
