ERWIN PFRANG: The Ghosts Ask

David Nolan Gallery has exhibited Erwin Pfrang’s work since the late 1980s. Pfrang’s peripatetic life began in Munich (where the artist was born in 1951) and then moved to Northern Italy, Sicily, and back north till his present days in Berlin. Literature has always been a central preoccupation for Pfrang, and on a number of occasions he has made complete series of works dedicated to different aspects of James Joyce’s writings. With Joyce, Pfrang shares a similar view of a world of chaos, where a stream of consciousness explores the human unconscious mind with no preconceptions of good or bad. Pfrang pulls back the curtain on humanity to expose scenes with harsh honesty. He is a loner, whose only interest is to search out the essentials of life, both dark and light, as Goya or Bacon might have done. There are no taboos in his world populated by autobiographical situations, memories, and desires, where humans without any masks lead tortured existences. His compositions evoke a modern-day Bruegel, but are more deeply psychological, often depicting multiple perspectives within a single sheet of paper.

Our exhibition, Erwin Pfrang: The Ghosts Ask, will feature a selection of works on paper dating between 2019 and 2024, and ranging in size from 7 x 9 7/8” to 30 7/8 x 42” displayed in conversation with a group of paintings by the artist. The drawings on view will showcase Pfrang’s multi-layered and wide range of mark making with graphite, which could be situated somewhere between Picasso, Dubuffet, and Joseph Beuys; yet the artist’s scratchy and soft surrealist line is totally unique, infused with a captivating and dreamlike quality. As Carroll Dunham once wrote of Pfrang: "This work could only be made in the late 20th century, in a western culture, but it is close to the hemorrhaging source of pictorial archetypes which must have been leaking into his awareness for a long time."