Opening on Thursday, February 9, 2023, 6–10pm

Jahn und Jahn presents the painter, graphic artist, and lyric poet Erwin Pfrang’s (b. Munich, 1951) first solo exhibition in Portugal. Titled “Blaring Silence”, the display gathers twenty of his paintings and drawings from the past two decades. In addition to works from the period in his oeuvre associated with his life in Catania, Sicily (through 2011), the exhibition spotlights pictures created in Berlin, where he has lived and worked for the last ten years.

Influenced by literature and music, Pfrang took an interest in art at a young age and started painting in the basement of his parents’ home as a teenager. He studied painting in Munich in the second half of the 1970s and had garnered some early success with his first exhibitions when, in 1987, he decided to move his family to Italy, where he would spend almost twenty years of his life in self-chosen seclusion, living in a series of towns and villages. The frequent relocations bespeak the curiosity that is one of his defining character traits. It is why, besides literature (in particular, James Joyce), experiences and encounters with people are an elementary source of inspiration for Pfrang’s subjects. An itinerant observer, he imbibes life and then relentlessly disgorges it in his work. Pfrang’s visual universe reveals his substantial intuition for the dark depths of outward and inward existence. Probing their most intimate recesses, the artist uncovers the traces and grooves that life engraves upon the human soul. It may be this need (and, by the same token, this capacity) that the artist himself has hinted at in conversation with the phrase “sporcarsi di vita”—sullying himself with life as a principle that underlies his art and lets him bring at least within reach, within the range of experience, what it might mean to be human.

Pfrang’s compositions reflect the unbearable horrors of the Holocaust, the sufferings of illness and death, loneliness and isolation, loss, the silent distress of the socially marginalized, the coldness of man-made technology, or even the misery and ruin precipitated by earthquakes and other disasters. He is a master of all that festers and seethes beneath the skin, not unlike agents of disease that in the end cause the immune system to collapse. Pfrang’s pictures seem haunted by painful memories and somber imaginations, yet they also crystallize the loving attention and empathy with which the artist dedicates himself to limning the individual’s physical presence and human existence. The portraits, in particular, manifest Pfrang’s brilliant gift for molding every crease, every blemish on the surface of the skin so that being itself comes to life in the medium of color.

The oddly puppet-like features of Pfrang’s figures are a hallmark of his art. Instead of interacting, they appear to be alone and mutely self-absorbed, although they do address themselves to the audience outside the pictorial space. Some of them recall small adults with far too large heads. Not unlike mannequins that look like humans, they play their roles in disguise, suggesting mendacity and truth to life at once. They are solitaries who, in their refusal to commit to a community, embody the artist’s fundamental skepticism vis-à-vis all kinds of peer pressure that might curtail the individual pursuit of his spiritual destiny. These eccentric companions of recollection serve Pfrang as his cast of characters in a “theatrum mundi” of the utmost complexity and ambiguity that finds its supreme expression in his finely wrought pictorial compositions.

Erwin Pfrang, b. Munich, 1951, studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1974–1979 and won the emerging-artist’s award of the Free State of Bavaria in 1982. He had his first exhibition at Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich, in 1984. Until today the artist is represented by Jahn und Jahn in Munich and Lisbon. In 1987, he and his family emigrated to Italy, where they lived in Montepulciano, various villages in the Val d’Orcia south of Siena, and elsewhere until 2000. Pfrang received an artist’s fellowship from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in 1989. His “Circe Drawings” inspired by James Joyce’s “Ulysses” were shown at the David Nolan Gallery, New York, in 1991. The “Dubliners Drawings”, after Joyce’s collection of short stories, were created in 1994 and shown at the same gallery a year later. The artist lived in Germany from 2000 until 2003, when he returned to Italy, settling in Catania, Sicily. Since 2011, Pfrang has lived and worked in Berlin.

Museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Albertina, Vienna; Busch-Reisinger Museum (Harvard Art Museums), Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.

Selected Solo Exhibitions: 2021 Katholische Akademie in Bayern, Munich; 2019 Buchheim Museum, Bernried; 2016; 2016 Axel Pairon Gallery, Knokke, Belgium; 2015, 2012, 2009, 2007, 2005, 2001, 1994, 1986 & 1984 Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich; 2013 Center for Advanced Studies, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich; 2007 Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; 2007 Università degli Studi di Catania, Centro Voltaire, Catania, IT; 2006 Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles; 2005, 2002, 1999, 1995, 1991 Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York; 2004 Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Dublin, Ireland; 2000 The Norwood Gallery, Austin, Texas; 1999 Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich; 1997 Daniel Weinberg Contemporary Art, San Francisco.

Bibliography:

Erwin Pfrang, Fingerspitzenhorizonte. Gedichte zu Bildern, Berlin 2022, 112 p.

Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, Erwin Pfrang. Das Gedächtnis der Hand, Munich 2021, 132 p.

Erwin Pfrang: Gedacht durch meine Augen, exh. cat. Buchheim Museum, ed. by Daniel J. Schreiber, Bernried 2019, 144 p.

Tobias Döring, »Erwin Pfrang illustriert Joyces Dubliners« in: Erwin Pfrang. Illustrationen zu James Joyce Dubliners, Center for Advanced Studies, LMU, Munich 2013, pp. 9–16.

Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, »Illustrations with a Difference«, in: Joyce in Art, exh. cat. Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin 2004, p. 63.

Frank Günzel, in: Unterwegs, exh. cat. Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, Munich 2001.

Lynn Gawell, »The Muse Is Within: The Psyche in the Century of Science«, in: Dreams 1900–2000. Science, Art, and the Unconscious Mind, Cornell University Press, Binghamton University Art Museum, State University of New York, 1999, pp. 49–50.

Erwin Pfrang. Bilder, with texts by Peter Eikemeier and Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, ed. by Fred Jahn, exh. cat. Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich1999, 66 p.

Carroll Dunham, »Erwin Pfrang«, in: Bomb, No. 69, December 1999, pp. 94–97.

Erwin Pfrang. I0 & LUI, ed. by David Nolan, exh. cat. Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York 1999, 39 p.

Erwin Pfrang. Arbeiten auf Papier, Odysseus und kein Ende, with texts by Claudia Denk, Tilman Falk and Michael Semff, 2 Vols, exh. cat. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich 1998, Vol. I 71 p., Vol. II 46 p.

Alan Jones, »Erwin Pfrang«, in: 6 Personali, ed. by Plinio de Martiis, exh. cat. Castelluccio di Pienza – La Foce, Siena, 1997, pp. 26–28.

Roberta Smith, »Erwin Pfrang«, exh. review Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York, in: The New York Times, October 20, 1995, p. 27. James Joyce, Dubliner, transl. by Harald Beck, illustr. by Erwin Pfrang, with an epilogue by Wolfgang Hilbig, Leipzig 1994, 206 p.

Michael Kimmelmann, »James Joyce’s Ulysses Translated for the Eye«, exh. review David Nolan Gallery, in: The New York Times, September 13, 1991.

Erwin Pfrang: Circe Drawings Based on James Joyce’s Ulysses, with a text by Erwin Pfrang, exh. cat. David Nolan Gallery, New York 1991, 39 p.

Wolfgang Holler, Zeichenkunst der Gegenwart: Sammlung Prinz Franz von Bayern, exh. cat. Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich 1988, pp. 147–149.

Erwin Pfrang. Zeichnungen, with a text by Dieter Kuhrmann, exh. cat. Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich 1984.