Little angel in Düsseldorf – can you see a reconciling?

The cultural business is the scene of conflicts. Cancellations have become everyday. Hardly any day passes without new boycott calls, petitions and protest. It is already good news when artists try to counteract increased polarization. The Israeli psychoanalyst, philosopher and artist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger deliberately decided against her decision that was made a long time ago not to issue in Germany and to show her works in Düsseldorfer K21. After the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023, she had resigned from the Documenta 16 finding commission to pause and mourn for a moment. The peace activist born in Tel Aviv in 1948-before the state was founded-is involved in human rights organizations such as Physicians for Human Rights, Women Wage Peace or the Palestinian-Israeli Forum of Bereft Families for equal rights of Israelis and Palestinians. It is one of those voices that are strongly for an immediate end of the war in Gaza, but which are hardly heard.

“Like the poet, the artist can only sweep the bottom of the world with every brush stroke, during and after all catastrophe, in the hope of some light,” believes Lichtenberg Ettinger and adopts this privilege of calm and pending. Painting can therefore first of all be understood as a personal practice of self -care or therapeutic exercise. The emphasis of this artistic self -description provides thinking. The artist works stoically for long periods of time on small and small formats to process what is incomprehensible.

This is clearly to be seen in the collages, watercolors, sketches and painting on canvas. The palette has become increasingly brighter and bright over the years. A development can be recognized by this, but not, as with other artists who have confident about their material and their artistic means. Lichtenberg Ettinger keeps starting again and again, as if it were about finding out which presentation options are imaginable at all. Instead of works of art that bring everything into a coherent compositional order, moments of pause that leave something on the scene. Art view becomes a process of empathy. Classic art -historical questions, about the coherence of the image structure, the painting style, the use of materials or the importance of individual image elements back into the background. There is space for associations.

Where landscapes, body, shapes and the like can be seen, they evaporate again. The ashes and the photososcopic dust, which the artist processes – also in the psychoanalytic sense – is covered by countless layers of paint that like varnish, patina or veil. Everything seems carefully enveloped, not to hide it, but to touch it, capture and protect it, where the memories are too fleeting. Few emotionally stirring fragments from books, family photos, aerial photographs are repeatedly used. Scenes such as a group of undressed women with children before execution by SS troops, the parents on a walk through the Jewish ghetto in Lodz or military aerial photographs of today’s Palestine from the First World War, recorded by German soldiers in the Empire. In an early phase, the artist put these pictures on the photocopier, interrupted the exposure, blurred the traces of the unfinished reproduction, interrupted the mechanics of memory.

How could she remember something that exceeds her memory, transgenerational trauma that is linked to constant violence? This artistic process is highly burdened by the violence of the twentieth century. It cannot be about “grasping the horror in pictures”, wrote Jacques Rancière about “historical pictures” (2013), “but to show what has just not” natural “image, the inhumanity, the process of negation of humanity.” According to Rancière, art rather has the task of “showing something invisible (…) because it is able to make the inhuman sensual sensual.”

But how can that work? How should that look? Many artists tried this in sensitive, shocking or highly questionable way. Lichtenberg Ettinger’s pictures, however, do not aim to bring the disaster, the inhumane, the horror to represent. “Art that interests me,” she says, “in love, in confidence in human ability, anger and pain to wrinkle and convey sublimens and the debris, the remains of violence by means of a new form, which-through what is called its beauty and what its truth is-evokes the other in devotion that goes beyond sympathy (Compassion-Beyond-Epathphy) to turn. “

In these words, the psychotherapist who undertakes artistic self -care can be heard in order not to embrace. Her art promises “maternal healing if, despite all the resistances, they are concerned with the human abilities of amazement, awe and devotion, while it is concerned about the suffering of others and bears the burden of the world and its memory.” On the other hand, it is difficult to say, even if the burden imposed on it seems intolerable. The beginning of intensive employment, perhaps even an open conversation, can be open to an open amazement. But it can also overwhelm, silence and disarm where it is absolutely set.

In the philosophical writings of Lichtenberg Ettingers, art is presented as a “aesthetic proto-ethical matrixial (matricial) room” in which the transition is clear from the senseless to a new sense, which does not explain the senseless person, but is a feeling of connection. This demands a lot from the viewer of their art, given the real experiences of war and violence. Whether it can be possible to recognize something against all resistance in the art of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is the important question that she asks her viewer.

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger: “Angel of Care/Angel of Carrance” until August 31st in the K21 of the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection in Düsseldorf