Frank Ettenberg – Master of Gestural Meditation

An encounter with an artist whose work has an inspirational significance in the search for “original thought” has a cathartic effect. One such artist is without doubt Frank Ettenberg, who was born on 7 May 1945 in Brooklyn, New York. As a young man he found inspiration for his drawings from life in the city and also from science-fiction films. At the age of fourteen he received a grant to study painting from New York University. Shortly afterward, he studied painting during the winter semester at the Brooklyn Museum School. After the completion of his university studies in Michigan he left for the American Southwest and arrived in New Mexico for a painting master class run by professor John Kacere. He received a grant at the artist’s compound in Roswell (New Mexico), settled in Santa Fe and from 1972 matured as an abstract artist. His works are represented in many collections in the USA and Europe.

If we evaluate the artistic value of the works of Frank Ettenberg from the wider developmental perspective, we see various stages in the establishment of his style. In the first phase, which we can date from the 1960s until 1972, Ettenberg was influenced by Surrealism, which expounds on the mental automation of internal thoughts without control by reason, under the influence of the psychoanalytical psychology of S.Freud. Particularly in the paintings “Crossroad’s Bind” (1968-72) and ”Try Not to Center” (1970) we see the strong echo of surrealist hallucinations and pseudo-hallucinations in the representation of the growth of strange phenomena. This biotic inspiration was typical for the first stage of the artist’s development. From the start of the 1970s a new phase in the development of his style began, which we can call the “symbolic/structural” aesthetic, linking the modulation of light energy and picturing dark and mysterious spaces. Space becomes “the structure of structures” to use the term coined by the thinker Durand. The artist’s monotypes are permanent “laboratories” of artistic conception. A characteristic aesthetic value of the works from this period is a dramatic symbol inspired by a dream. We appreciate his sense for the multidimensionalism of dream spaces. In the 1980s Ettenberg turned away from lyric abstraction and his artistic work became more and more mysterious, in the spirit of “the unknown” of Willi Baumeister, who propagated continuous change, a view into the creative process “about oneself”. Ettenberg moved after the 80’s from “colour painting” to “action painting”. It is significant that Ettenberg differs fundamentally from the French Abstraction – Création school. He does not go towards God like Roger Bissiere, and also avoids post-cubist abstraction. Ettenberg knew that the French were running into the danger of a return to Impressionism. He was instead attracted to the kind of work exemplified by Franz Kline, Hans Hartung and Antonio Saura.

In the 1980’s the philosophical concept of surface painting took hold (see “Survivor” from 1989 and “Painter’s Rug”, also from that year), which had clearly metaphysical aims – the movement of spiritual energy in an unknown landscape composed of rational spatial planes. The crowning achievement of philosophic symbolism is the picture “Trio at Midnight” (1992-94, reproduced in the artist’s catalogue printed in Lienz in 1994), so this philosophic line originating from the analysis of mysterious existence and alienated existence, including nothingness (according to Sartre) continues.

In the 1990s two lines of style appear: the first represents “informal” gestural painting that is well able to express the philosophy of chaos. Particularly in landscape formats, it is able to show unknown worlds of colour illusions and hallucinations. It retains something from lyrical abstraction. The second is represented by calligraphic gestural painting originating in direct gesture (“Evidence of Growth II”, 1996). Here any kind of lyrical abstraction finishes and Ettenberg comes closer to the magical abstraction of the oriental type. The gesture is meditation. Here is found the truth in what the American aesthete Susanne Langer said: that art does not only express feelings, but “presents human feelings in symbolic forms...” Contrasts in Ettenberg’s pictures from the 1990s become sharper, the form becomes a ritual and we have feelings of holiness. The transfer from consciousness to unconsciousness, described by Freud, on the contrary is completely shocking, even hypnotic. Ettenberg is a philosopher of gestural meditation because his works allow us to see into our own nature, as described by ZEN philosophy. It is a lightning-fast illumination, again according to ZEN, because it sees the whole truth with one look.


Prof. Dr. Miroslav Klivar
The American Society for Aesthetics
Prague, Czech Republic, 2005