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enius that she confronts with her subjectivity as a woman; what she names the “Matrixial Gaze.” This gaze privileges spirituality, the subconscious, and the cosmos, or what the artist designates the “subrealities”, that sit between the emotional or cerebral universe and what we perceive as reality. In her painting process, which often involves applying delicate, ghostly strokes that transform imagery from archival photographs, Ettinger challenges the patriarchal structures that have driven modernism’s purist, teleological project of placing abstraction and realism in separate boxes. Putting her own emotional vulnerability and failure at the forefront of her work, Ettinger’s work shows that abstraction can reflect compassion and mutual empathy in human experience — not in ways that can be easily commodified or defined within art history’s preordained styles, but capture the ‘unknowable’, and she leaves them unresolved.