Erwin Pfrang

Life and work

Pfrang studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1974-79. Later he spent many years as an independent artist in Montepulciano, Val d’Orcia and Catania, Italy, interrupted by stays in Munich and Augsburg. He presently lives and works in Berlin. Erwin Pfrang is the grandson of the Munich folk comedian Konstantin Pfrang.

Carla Schulz-Hoffmann makes an attempt at characterising the painter: “An artist such as Erwin Pfrang inhabits an alternative world, a tiny microcosm of subjectivity, and lives that life uncompromisingly, with all the limitations and hardships that it entails. Among twentieth-century artists a comparable stance can be encountered perhaps in Jean Fautrier, but certainly in Wols. The succinct characterization of the latter’s manner of working by his friend Henry Pierry Roché applies equally well to Pfrang: ‘Wols sheds his drawings as a snail does its shell – naturally and painfully.’”

Erwin Pfrang is represented by gallerists Fred Jahn, Munich and David Nolan, New York.

Painting and Literature

Pfrang’s lifelong passion for literature becomes particularly evident in his involvement with the works of the Irish writer James Joyce. The result being three cycles of drawings about Dubliners and Ulysses. The New York Times called his drawings for the Circe episode of the novel: "a brilliant solo debut." Other drawings are dedicated to the tale Tubutsch by the German Expressionist writer Albert Ehrenstein and Gerald Barry’s opera The Intelligence Park, libretto by Vincent Deane.

Representationalism

Pfrang comments on the role of representationalism in his work as follows: “Non-representational art presupposes the artist’s knowledge of what reality is. If reality as the result of our questionable sensory experiences, however, is not something we take for granted, we are obliged to "actually create reality" (Günter Eich), to auscultate the world and its objects to discover their nature, and in the painter’s case to sound it out with the blindman’s stick of the brush.

Museums

Important Exhibitions

Literature