ERWIN PFRANG: The Ghosts Ask

David Nolan Gallery is pleased to announce Erwin Pfrang: The Ghosts Ask, its sixth solo exhibition of the celebrated German artist (b. 1951 in Munich). The gallery included Pfrang’s work in a group show in 1988, a year after its founding, and mounted its first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in 1991. A selection of Pfrang’s recent paintings and works on paper, showcasing the artist’s acute observations and original style, will be on view in The Ghosts Ask from January 10 through March 1, 2025, also coinciding with Master Drawings New York 2025.

Erwin Pfrang’s art rarely has a finite entry or exit point, nor many of the understood conventions of painting and drawing. His compositions evoke a modern-day Bosch, but are more deeply psychological, often depicting multiple perspectives within a single canvas or sheet of paper. According to the artist, “when you turn away from a picture, you often don’t know what was going on.” These skills are in part fostered by his unwillingness to remain in one place. His peripatetic life began in Germany and moved to Central Italy and Sicily; then back North until the present, where he lives and works in Berlin. Each change in place affixed a different lens onto the artist’s singular practice.

In Munich, Pfrang grew up surrounded by the art of Peter Paul Rubens, Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, and German Expressionists like Max Beckmann. The fleshy figures of Rubens and psychological complexity of the German Expressionists clearly affected his work, which is intellectually rich, multilayered, and sometimes nightmarish, evoking comparisons to Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, James Ensor, and Paula Rego. Pfrang lures us into his world peopled with uninhibited characters who interact or float in space, often confronting the viewer. An enduring fascination with James Joyce’s Ulysses shaped Pfrang’s understanding of human interaction, feeding his vision of an alternate world where he could examine the raw realities of love, sex, death, and everything in between. His drawings, executed with a lightness and immediacy akin to stream-of-consciousness, channel Joyce’s influence and radiate with the automatic, unfiltered energy of Antonin Artaud.

Disenchanted and increasingly tired with bourgeois pretensions, Pfrang left Germany in the 1980s and spent years in Italy, moving between Montepulciano, Val d’Orcia, Liguria, and Catania. During his time in Sicily, he lived briefly among the Romani people, taken by their presence and lifestyle. These relationships informed his work, with his portraits reflecting his belief in the intimacy of close observation. He considered many of them a “second family” and immersed himself in their worldview, earning their trust and sharing their perspective on the world. His subjects range from close friends to anti-establishment figures and historical personalities, each carrying a distinct presence and purpose.

Pfrang’s paintings and drawings can either materialize with the multiplicity of a spider web or as clearer and more dramatic images; each result is equally intricate. Die Gespenster lassen bitten (The Ghosts Ask) (2022) is an illustration of the former. Within the rich textures and colors characteristic of Pfrang’s oil paintings, one spots disembodied limbs and heads, rotting fish, rats, phalluses, the crucifixion of a young boy, and the two central figures who appear to be controlled by older, godlike figures directly above them. Foreground and background dissolve, becoming irrelevant. There is a sense of fragility, suffering and existential unease in his imagery which evokes feelings of disorientation and alienation. The painting defies logic and even gravity – but the artist has said he is only a medium, an interpreter – so make of it what you wish.

His direct address of the audience reaches a climax in Tieffieger (Low-Flying Aircraft) (2023), with its naked, shouting central figure. The smaller figures and background motifs laze along, either not noticing or on a completely different plane from this loud figure. Their isolation does not stretch to the audience as we are made a direct part of this painting, conversing with its central figure and wondering what, possibly, they could be asking of us. This strange, dreamlike scenario creates a visually arresting, complex configuration, with Pfrang’s masterful, pastel-like handling of oil paint also evident – here he combines and dissolves brushstrokes in a painterly texture; a little farther on the same canvas he applies oil paint as if he were drawing with thick pastels.

The numerous drawings featured in the exhibition, dating from 2019 to 2024, encapsulate the emotion of Pfrang’s more compositionally complicated works and prove his artistic scope as well as his draftsman’s skill. Portraits are particularly special to the artist because when rendering real human beings he “sinks into contemplation of what cannot be seen.” Although representational, the figures in Pfrang’s paintings and drawings do not tell a coherent story. Rather, they depict microcosmic fragments of the artist’s personal experience as he involves himself entirely in the act of observing subjects and society. His work explores the tensions between distance and scale within suspended, almost otherworldly spaces. Pfrang’s uninhibited characters inhabit these spaces. A true artist’s artist, his work demands attention for its originality and depth.