Klodin Erb | Danke, ich schlafe gut | Galerie Urs Meile

The paintings from the series Danke, ich schlafe gut (2026) by Swiss artist Klodin Erb form a loose topology of inhabited interiors. Executed in oil on black canvas, a support that is not merely a background but a structural element, these intimate-scale works allow images to surface as if drawn out of a dreamlike depth. Erb’s spatial intelligence is central to the series. Beds, draperies, upholstered seats and everyday objects gather in rooms often defined by sharply angled corners that pull the eye like magnets, reinforcing the impression of entering a psychological environment that belongs simultaneously to personal and collective reverie. Within this scenography, human figures, animals, mannequins and hybrid presences coexist in a condition of ontological equivalence, each engaged in actions that hover between self-absorption and rehearsal. Erb’s pictorial language moves along a figurative lineage that extends beyond historical Surrealism and contemporary inflections of magical realism. Her method of allowing forms to surface from darkness into light reveals a distinctly Baroque sensibility, while at the same time recalling the psychological atmospheres of artists such as Füssli, Böcklin and Redon, and evoking Symbolist visions as well as the Gothic grotesque. Her interiors also resonate with female reconfigurations of the domestic as a space of tension and transformation, from the corporeal narratives of Paula Rego to the cosmologies of Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington.