“The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth,” Theodor Adorno wrote. “For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject.” Pain announced itself quite clearly in “The Ghosts Ask,” an exhibition featuring thirty-three paintings and drawings by German artist Erwin Pfrang. Untitled (Kruzifxus) (Untitled [Crucifix]), 2007, and Untitled, 2022, are a pair of canvases that deal explicitly with the uglier aspects of daily existence. In the former, a nude man is splayed out, Christlike, in a composition stuffed with mostly abstract forms that in certain instances resemble entrails or dismembered limbs. In the latter, two diminutive figures wearing head-concealing masks—the kind that look like those worn by severe-burn victims—are prodded and inspected by medical personnel under harsh-yellow lights. In the ink-and-watercolor drawing Vitrinen (Showcases), 2019, an unclothed man stands on a round platform, like meat on a butcher block, eyed by a trio of ostensibly wealthy, well-dressed people. The watercolor Puppentheater (Puppet Theater), 2020, depicts a group of chicly outfitted youths staring disaffectedly into space. They are pretty and surly, like those empty vessels in countless fashion ads—exquisite but expendable. Objectivity, often in the form of consumer society, informs many of Pfrang’s subjects, turning them into simulations of real people. As though taking his cue from Adorno—who was acutely aware of the reification of human beings in both the Nazi concentration camps and the world of capitalism—Pfrang shows the reduction of the flesh-and-bones subject to an anonymous, hollowed-out thing.
The artist has a rather jaundiced view of Germanness, one that appears to be weighted by more than a little bit of guilt. The painting Erlkönigs Töchter (Erlking's Daughters), 2022—a bizarre take on Goethe’s 1782 poem “Erlkönig,” in which a vicious elf king uses his daughters to lure wayward children to their deaths—features a pair of towering women among throngs of broken boys and men. These Brobdingnagian ladies, more scary than seductive, lurk behind a figure wearing a crown and what might be a military jacket: presumably the evil goblin father of Goethe’s text, surrounded by the casualties brought to him by his wicked offspring. The oil-on-canvas Blutspender Verein (Blood Donor Association), 2022, might allude to the nationalistic blood-and-soil ideology of the Third Reich: It depicts a group of hideously deformed or injured white people standing in an acid-green and piss-yellow room, giving one another a thumbs-up. For all the wit and irony of Pfrang’s work, I suggest that he is haunted by World War II, even though he was born in 1951, six years after Germany’s fall. The dark masterpieces Tieffieger (Low-Flying Aircraft), 2023, implies as much. It pictures an Aryan-blond youth, crouching and screaming, seemingly traumatized by the corpses of sea creatures, giant insects, and human beings encircling him. His creepily elongated penis points to a shoeless dead boy underfoot. This scene, calling to mind the aftermath of a Luftwaffe bombing from a never-ending nightmare, is a rendering of perverse masculinity and delusional grandiosity. The composition is brilliantly made—its background, crafted from layers of blacks, browns, yellows, and greens, only heightens the work’s more nauseating aspects.
Sixteenth-century painter and architect Giorgio Vasari thought German art was “barbarian” because it lacked the classical grace of Italian Renaissance art. But Pfrang’s work reminds us that Germans abandoned what historian Eric Hobsbawm called Enlightenment values, more particularly “a universal system of rules and standards of moral behavior, embodied in the institutions dedicated to the rational progress of humanity.” “In art,” Adorno wrote, “the point of reference continues to be the subject, which can and does continue to articulate itself in alienated and disfigured form.” German art has been doing this successfully for centuries, of course—and Pfrang’s monstrous imagery is a wonderful example.
—Donald Kuspit
