‘Erwin Pfrang: The Ghosts Ask’

David Nolan Gallery, NYC

You don’t view an Erwin Pfrang exhibition so much as submit to it. And The Ghosts Ask, currently on display at David Nolan Gallery, feels like a séance disguised as a sketchbook — equal parts excavation, interrogation, and metaphysical staring contest.

For the uninitiated, Pfrang is not your crowd-pleasing German draftsman. He is the kind of artist whose pen lines twitch with the mania of memory and whose figures — half-formed, contorted, unsettling — appear not so much drawn as summoned. In The Ghosts Ask, he continues his lifelong preoccupation with Beckettian absurdity, bodily failure, and the futility of clarity. It’s not cheerful, but it’s honest.

These works — largely works on paper — seem to crawl out of the page. They hover in that charged space between figuration and abstraction, where limbs become words and mouths threaten to become voids. A recurring motif: the fragile, unsteady figure, often mid-collapse or frozen in some grotesque, Chaplinesque gesture. Pfrang’s ghosts don’t wail; they mutter. They shuffle. They scratch at the edge of your moral compass.

There’s anger here, yes, but also sly, grim humour. A laugh that catches in the throat. You sense Pfrang’s ghostly subjects aren’t asking for peace — they’re demanding explanation. Who gets to speak? Who gets to forget? Who gets to be whole?

What makes The Ghosts Ask especially compelling right now is its utter refusal to flatter the viewer. In an era of AI-generated perfection and hyper-slick curation, Pfrang’s haunted little dramas — drawn in ink, pencil, and possibly the residue of dreams — feel defiantly human. They are messy. They are spare. They are, somehow, unkillable.

To enter this show is to feel like you’re standing ankle-deep in a psychic bog, and Pfrang — absurdist, mystic, surgeon of the subconscious — is grinning from the other side, holding a mirror.

Go. Stay a while. Let the ghosts ask you something.

You probably owe them an answer.