Portikus

Michael Pfrommer's paintings and drawings speak of mystical universes. His motifs grow out of everyday impressions from his immediate surroundings as well as from his friends and family. He recalls fragments from films, pieces of music, song lyrics, and picture stories, knitting them together in forever new ways in order to capture moments that strike him as significant. The results vary, from disfigured self-portraits and bizarre comic strip characters to bleak or lifeless landscapes and subtly delineated still lifes. Pfrommer's pictures reveal his fascination with painters such as Bernard Buffet, James Ensor, and Francisco de Goya, whose somber and often macabre pictures are profoundly unsettling depictions of human and psychological states. Pfrommer's particular talent is to face the frequently abysmal conditions he sees—be they social or personal—with great subtlety and a grain of humor. His schematic approach underlines this further: he paints in a compulsive fashion, always using the same paper size, constantly repeating and reworking motifs or taking them up again after some time. The result is a hermeneutic oeuvre in which certain impressions, places, objects, and people return time and again. Repetition, coupled with restless insistence, is a central feature of Pfrommer's work. The exhibition presents his work in unprecedented breadth in order to highlight its complexity.