Erwin Pfrang Nolan/Eckman Gallery 560 Broadway (at Prince Street) SoHo Through tomorrow
In his own quiet, old-fashioned way, Erwin Pfrang is among the most promising artists to emerge recently in Germany. Yes, his new ink-and-wash drawings are anxious tangles of nearly automatic line that can bring to mind the postwar art of Dubuffet, Picasso and Giacometti as well as Georg Baselitz. And his small jewel-like paintings, with their cautious separations of line and color, Expressionistic faces and suggestions of limb-strewn battlefields, cast an even stronger backward glance.
Yet in many instances, Mr. Pfrang's considerable powers of imagination and draftsmanship shove these associations completely out of the picture. Consider the especially manic, slightly disheveled figures of "You Stay," and the inchoate piled structure of "Art Collector's Sample Brew," which conjures up a frantic torpor, if such a thing is possible, of both owning and looking. Best of all is a suite of drawings based on the writings of James Joyce, whose "Ulysses" also inspired the tenebrous pencil drawings of Mr. Pfrang's first show here. Now the artist has turned to "Dubliners," producing the illustrations for a new German-language edition. In each instance, he manages to capture something of the psychic intensity and narrative drama of Joyce's taut, epiphanic stories, the whipping so fervently talked about in "An Encounter," the wrenching parting of the lovers of "Eveline," while conveying a grand obsession that is entirely his own. ROBERTA SMITH
