Opening July 4, 2024, 6–9pm

For more than forty years, the painter and draughtsman Erwin Pfrang has asserted himself as a solitary figure among the German artists of his generation. There is simply no one else who can compare with him. An imaginary line of tradition - from George Grosz to Renato Gattuso to Lucian Freud, for example - may illuminate certain historical affinities, but who in the contemporary world of art dares to stage such "realistic" figure tableaux in a comparably "fanatical" manner, which present an iconographic vocabulary of the most ludicrous kind with great urgency? Early on - during his time at the academy in Munich, which ended in 1979 - Pfrang declaredly strove to "not belong" and in this self-chosen role of anachronistic hermit he has led his life and created his work over the decades.

Pfrang's artistic productivity - both in terms of his paintings and his works on paper - is still undiminished and intense. In the last two years in particular, a wealth of drawings has been created alongside the paintings, including haunting portraits in small and medium formats as well as surprising, pictorially large sheets populated by a true cosmos of figurative and animalistic nature in combination with symbolic calligraphic elements. The artist works predominantly with the traditional media of charcoal, ink and sometimes also watercolour, sometimes creating areas washed over plaster with the help of a large Japanese brush, which is also used in Japanese calligraphy. What Pfrang said in 1997 about the genuine materialism of drawing still applies: “It is true that the drawing speaks, but while you are still drawing, what it speaks melts away on your tongue, dives back into the silence of its materiality, a process like the melting of a glaze over a solid ceramic body”. [1]

Pfrang's pictorial content is difficult to decipher. “My pictures do not interpret anything, but on the other hand they expect the same courtesy from the viewer-reader: not to be interpreted.“ [2] In predominantly figurative scenes, things seen or experienced mingle with daydreams, with distant events or memories, with the subconscious, the long-buried. It all seems to come together in an unfiltered and unpredictable way, with some things breaking through ruthlessly in the endless tangle of threads of thought. Pfrang's proximity to an artist such as Antonin Artaud, who had a stimulating effect on Giacometti and Wols as well as Fautrier and Dubuffet, can be described as essential. Artaud did not want his works on paper, with their inseparable combination of writing and drawing, to be regarded as "works of art" at all, but rather as diary-like "sketches": “exploratory or abusive forays in all directions of chance, possibility, opportunity and fate…in the wildness and confusion of their handwriting”. [3]

In his long-standing exploration of the poet James Joyce, for example in the cycles on "Ulysses" or "Dubliners" created since 1988, Pfrang has succeeded in counteracting any semblance of literary illustration. The linguistic structure of Joyce's poems virtually drove the manic draughtsman to "construct" a pictorial stream of fabulation in which the most divergent elements overlap simultaneously.

Pfrang's recent large-format paintings in particular thrive on this very tension of underpinning the never-ending representational reservoir of his pictorial imagination with a kind of "abstract" system that is capable of structuring even the most labyrinthine pictorial puzzles with their densely interwoven microcosms in the most unusual spatial perspectives. With his wide-awake artistic instinct, his "constructive" spirit in combination with his eminent colouristic sensibility, Pfrang is able to lend the "delirium" sparked here a tamed form time and again.

Michael Semff

[1] Erwin Pfrang, letter to Michael Semff, December 17, 1997.

[2] Erwin Pfrang, “Entwurf einer Rede am 3. Juli”, in: Erwin Pfrang. Illustrationen zu James Joyce Dubliners, Center for Advanced Studies, LMU, Munich 2013, p.4

[3] Antonin Artaud, “Le visage humain”, in: Portraits et dessins par Antonin Artaud, exh. cat. Galerie Pierre, Paris 1947, no pag.

Bibliography: Erwin Pfrang, Fingerspitzenhorizonte. Gedichte zu Bildern, Berlin 2022, 112 p.

Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, Erwin Pfrang. Das Gedächtnis der Hand, Munich 2021, 132 p.

Erwin Pfrang: Gedacht durch meine Augen, exh. cat. Buchheim Museum, ed. by Daniel J. Schreiber, Bernried 2019, 144 p.

Erwin Pfrang. Illustrationen zu James Joyce Dubliners, Center for Advanced Studies, LMU, Munich 2013, 20 p.

Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, “Illustrations with a Difference”, in: Joyce in Art, exh. cat. Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin 2004, p. 63.

Lynn Gawell, “The Muse Is Within: The Psyche in the Century of Science”, in: Dreams 1900–2000. Science, Art, and the Unconscious Mind, Cornell University Press, Binghamton University Art Museum, State University of New York, 1999, pp. 49–50.

Erwin Pfrang. Bilder, with texts by Peter Eikemeier and Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, ed. by Fred Jahn, exh. cat. Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich, 1999, 66 p.

Carroll Dunham, “Erwin Pfrang”, in: Bomb, No. 69, December 1999, pp. 94–97.

Erwin Pfrang. I0 & LUI, ed. by David Nolan, exh. cat. Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York 1999, 39 p.

Erwin Pfrang. Arbeiten auf Papier, Odysseus und kein Ende, with texts by Claudia Denk, Tilman Falk and Michael Semff, 2 Vols, exh. cat. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich 1998, Vol. I 71 p., Vol. II 46 p.

Alan Jones, “Erwin Pfrang”, in: 6 Personali, ed. by Plinio de Martiis, exh. cat. Castelluccio di Pienza—La Foce, Siena, 1997, pp. 26–28.

Roberta Smith, “Erwin Pfrang”, exh. review Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York, in: The New York Times, October 20, 1995, p. 27.

James Joyce, Dubliner, transl. by Harald Beck, illustr. by Erwin Pfrang, with an epilogue by Wolfgang Hilbig, Leipzig 1994, 206 p.

Michael Kimmelmann, “James Joyce’s Ulysses Translated for the Eye”, exh. review David Nolan Gallery, in: The New York Times, September 13, 1991.

Erwin Pfrang: Circe Drawings Based on James Joyce’s Ulysses, with a text by Erwin Pfrang, exh. cat. David Nolan Gallery, New York 1991, 39 p.

Wolfgang Holler, Zeichenkunst der Gegenwart: Sammlung Prinz Franz von Bayern, exh. cat. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich 1988, pp. 147–149.

Erwin Pfrang. Zeichnungen, with a text by Dieter Kuhrmann, exh. cat. Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich 1984.

Erwin Pfrang, b. Munich, 1951, studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1974–1979 and won the emerging-artist’s award of the Free State of Bavaria in 1982. He had his first exhibition at Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich, in 1984. Until today the artist is represented by Jahn und Jahn in Munich and Lisbon. In 1987, he and his family emigrated to Italy, where they lived in Montepulciano, various villages in the Val d’Orcia south of Siena, and elsewhere until 2000. He received an artist’s fellowship from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1989. His “Circe Drawings” inspired by James Joyce’s “Ulysses” were shown at the David Nolan Gallery, New York, in 1991. The “Dubliners Drawings” after Joyce’s collection of short stories, were created in 1994 and shown at the same gallery a year later. The artist lived in Germany from 2000 until 2003, when he returned to Italy, settling in Catania, Sicily. Since 2011, Pfrang has lived and worked in Berlin.

Museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Albertina, Vienna; Busch-Reisinger Museum (Harvard Art Museums), Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Selected Solo Exhibitions: 2023 Jahn und Jahn, Lisboa, Portugal; 2021 Katholische Akademie in Bayern, Munich; 2019 Buchheim Museum, Bernried; 2016 Axel Pairon Gallery, Knokke, Belgium; 2015, 2012, 2009, 2007, 2005, 2001, 1994, 1986 & 1984 Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich; 2013 Center for Advanced Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich; 2007 Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; 2007 Università degli Studi di Catania, Centro Voltaire, Catania, IT; 2006 Daniel Wein-berg Gallery, Los Angeles; 2005, 2002, 1999, 1995, 1991 Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York; 2004 Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin, Ireland; 2000 The Norwood Gallery, Austin, Texas; 1999 Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich; 1997 Daniel Weinberg Contemporary Art, San Francisco.