ERWIN PFRANG German, b. 1951

Erwin 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. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. 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.

Pfrang’s work is included in many public collections such as the Museum on Modern Art, New York; Morgan Library, New York; Duerckheim Collection, London; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, München; Albertina, Vienna; Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard; Neue Pinakothek, Munich; Missouri; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, Munich and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Selected solo exhibitions include Erwin Pfrang: ‘Neue Bilder’, Galerie Fred Jahn, München; ‘Paintings’, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles; ‘Hades and Other Drawings’, Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York and ‘Circe Drawings’, Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin, Ireland. Group exhibitions include ‘Deutsche Zeichnungen und Originalgrafik der Gegenwart’, Wolfram Völcker Fine Art, Berlin; ‘Joyce in Art’, Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland and ‘Dreams 1900–2000’, The Equitable Gallery, New York and Passage de Retz, Paris.