Events

The Israeli painter Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, internationally renowned for her artwork as much as for her prolific and path-breaking essays on art, ethics, psychoanalysis, and feminism, is in Buffalo until May 18 thanks largely to generous support from the UB Creative Arts Initiative, the UB Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture and UB Art Galleries. Buffalonians will have several opportunities to engage with the many facets of her artistic and ethical practice.

The centerpiece of Ettinger’s residency is an extensive exhibit of her artwork at UB Anderson Gallery, BRACHA: Pietà—Eurydice—Medusa. This is the first—and long overdue—museum exhibition of her work in the United States. Visitors will find UB Anderson Gallery transformed, its usual white walls now painted a deep shade of violet, specially chosen by the artist. The color echoes the leitmotif of purple that travels across the one hundred paintings, drawings, notebooks, and videos included in the exhibition, so that the viewer is quickly drawn into the intimate space of Bracha’s artwork.

Both abstract and hauntingly figurative, as the title of the exhibition suggests, this work draws upon mythological sources to make sense of personal and historical traumatic experience. Earlier works begin with archival photographs linked to the experience of her family during the Shoah or to specific events, such as the Ponary massacre. More recent works emerge from the resurgence of shellshock that goes back to remarkable events, in 1967, when the artist as a young woman led an operation to rescue the survivors of a sinking battleship.

Whereas the identifiable specificity of these events often recedes, like Eurydice, they remain submerged in the layered surface, just out of reach, welcoming the viewer into a distance that can never be crossed. The exhibition is on view at UB Anderson Gallery, 1 Martha Jackson Place, through July 29.

Ettinger will offer the public an opportunity to engage personally with her and with her work in a gallery talk this Wednesday May 9, 4:30-5:30 PM, also at UB Anderson Gallery.

Finally, in a public lecture at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, “Memory’s Wound: On Art and Ethics,” Ettinger—a patient and charismatic speaker—will take participants on a guided tour of her artworks and offer reflections on art as an ethical practice that invents new ways of opening borders and forging links between self and other, femininity and humanity, myth and history, aesthetics and ethics, and individual and historical trauma. Such reflections are urgently needed in today’s political climate. This event is a unique opportunity to get an intimate and personal introduction to the work of an important and fascinating artist. The lecture is free and open to the public and will take place in the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s auditorium next Tuesday, May 15, 7:00pm.