September

Erwin Pfrang’s drawings at the David Nolan Gallery. Although Pfrang was born in Munich just over forty years ago, the packed panoramas of weirdly contorted figures that pour forth from his pencil look like products of the Germany of sixty or seventy years ago. Pfrang’s scenes of monstrous, teeming humanity have a vitriolic, nightmarish aura which suggests that this child of the Fifties has steeped himself in the work of Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz, along with the Belgian James Ensor. Taken one by one, Pfrang’s figures don’t have the succinct graphic elegance of the individuals in the Beckmann or Grosz works in black and white; but his figures, which emerge out of accumulations of light, tendrilly, sketchy lines (which may be in part inspired by the drawings of Joseph Beuys), do suggest a kind of nervous, bridled energy. This series of drawings was inspired by “Circe,” the Nighttown section toward the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which Pfrang, in a catalogue essay, says has a “structural rhythm [that] is seemingly determined by accumulated masses of detail relating to figures and scenes; now and then the flow of events solidifies into definite form. One cannot speak of stasis, but such moments furnish an occasion to stand and stare.” Pfrang follows this idea of a structure that is achieved through accumulation in his drawings, where figures of widely varying sizes and shapes appear above and below and behind and in front of one another