David Nolan New York
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New York, NY 10001
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Nolan/Eckman Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent drawings by Erwin Pfrang (b. 1951).
Entire worlds inhabit Erwin Pfrang's drawings. Figures multiply over the surface of the paper like bacteria growing in a petri dish, with one image morphing into another seemingly unrelated drama. Anxiously scratched in ink and pencil, the inhabitants of Pfrang's drawings engage in sex, violence, and other gruesome manifestations of the artist's unconscious, surrounded by totemic signs and unrecognizable detritus.
Over the years, Erwin Pfrang has focused his creative imagination on James Joyce's modern classic, Ulysses, which chronicles Leopold Bloom's 16 hour journey through the streets of 1904 Dublin. The Hades drawings illuminate chapter 6 of the book where we follow Bloom and a myriad array of Dublin's citizenry as they join a procession for the funeral of Paddy Dignam. Decaying flesh and figures overcome with grief bring to mind the gnarled figures of Otto Dix and George Grosz, artists of an earlier generation who were equally concerned with the human condition in the modern era.
The Hades series will travel to the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich in 2006. Pfrang currently lives in Catania, Italy. This is his fifth solo exhibition at Nolan/Eckman Gallery.