Erwin Pfrang: The Ghosts Ask

Alfred Mac Adam · The Brooklyn Rail

The last time we had a chance to be disquieted by Erwin Pfrang’s phantasmagoria was back in 2002. We who remember 2002 have missed him; younger people now have the enviable chance to see his work for the first time. Pfrang was born in 1951, in Munich, the capital city of German Expressionism and home of the 1911 Blue Rider group. His birthplace and his relationship to Expressionism are a problem.

The problem arises from the deterministic view of artists and art, which declares artists’ race, class, and gender to be the determining factors in the meaning of their work. No critic of Pfrang fails to mention his debt to Expressionism, from James Ensor and Edvard Munch down to Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. And rightly so, but we should not use that association to write off Pfrang as “just another German Expressionist.” Sometimes a prodigy like Pfrang takes control of an extant style and produces something new. And this is the point: Erwin Pfrang works in an expressionist idiom, but he makes it his own language.

The basic traits of expressionist art—distortion, exaggeration, unnatural color—all appear in Pfrang’s work, but something else makes his work unique. Pfrang produced the thirty-four drawings and paintings in this show between 2007 and 2024, but they do not constitute a retrospective. This is because of Pfrang’s signature style: we don’t expect radical changes in his work. What we do want—and get—is a process of perpetual exploration of artistic possibilities. Any changes, doubtless important to the artist himself, are insignificant to viewers, especially those unfamiliar with his work.

 Take a pair of drawings from 2023: the first titled Engel bringt das Gewünschte [Angel Brings What Is Desired], 5 by 12 inches, and its near-twin, Untitled.. The composition ironically evokes Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, but instead of God reaching out to animate Adam, Pfrang shows an angel, the figure on the right, either spitting into a misshapen Adam’s mouth or simply joined mouth-to-mouth to him by this bilious line. A diminutive figure between the two, perhaps set back, seems about to intervene, but to what end we cannot say. The untitled alternative version alters the relationship: all we see is the angel’s inverted head now linked by a brownish-black line to the still red-capped Adam. But the Adam now has nails driven into his back. For Pfrang, the creation of Man only brought suffering into this vale of tears.
 
When Pfrang turns to painting the unanswered, unanswerable questions pile up. The 2022 oil on canvas (59 by 39 inches) that supplies the show’s title, Die Gespenster lassen bitten (The ghosts ask—or alternatively “the ghosts welcome you.”) As with the Adam drawings, this painting seems to be a variation on the Crucifiction, with a juvenile Christ in reddish shorts on the right and a bemused Mary Magdalene wearing workout gear on the left. And then the icons go off the rails: Golgotha is a latticework charnel house with body parts strewn about. A woman, the Virgin Mary perhaps, stands behind the Christ figure, with lines reminiscent of the lines in the Adam drawings running from her hands to his head. Christ holds a hammer in his right hand, so he is the author of his own torture. Spectators to the sacrifice abound, including a formally dressed man improbably holding a knife and fork, a tiny woman gazing fondly at the Magdalene, and a gaggle of benign hounds. The ghosts are Pfrang’s artistic forbearers: they indeed welcome him and us to the madhouse of shattered icons and shattered meanings that inhabit Pfrang’s imagination. Ghosts are always symptoms of repression, and they manifest themselves in all their glory in this circus of fragments.

Where tradition and pictorial perspective get smashed to bits is the astounding 2022 oil on canvas Erlkönigs Töchter [Erlking’s Daughters]. The point of departure is a 1782 ballad by Goethe in which a father carries his son on horseback in a wild escape while the son feels he is being pursued by the Fairy King, who speaks to him:

Do you, fine boy, want to go with me?
My daughters shall wait on you finely;
My daughters lead the nightly dance,
And rock and dance and sing you to sleep.

These daughters are not comforting angels. Pfrang includes two of the daughters, one a sexy siren with a horribly mutilated sex, the other (on the right) an androgyne guffawing on the shoulders of a strongman wearing a gas mask. In the center, the Fairy King wears half a military uniform that Pfrang outlines by incising into the paint and adorns with a bright red Iron Cross on his chest. All around these figures, in fluctuating perspective, are dozens of figures—adults, children—alive or soon-to-be dead. If hell is chaos, where two and two do not make four, where all perspectives jumble, then Pfrang has depicted hell. Unbelievable, impossible to forget.

January 28, 2025