Klodin Erb (b. 1963), Venus in fur, 2016. Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 cm. Private collection, Zurich © Klodin Erb. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich.
AARAU. - Klodin Erb (*1963, Winterthur) is one of the most important Swiss painters of our time. In 2022, she received the prestigious Prix Meret Oppenheim award in recognition of her artistic career spanning nearly three decades. The show at the Aargauer Kunsthaus is Klodin Erb’s largest institutional solo-exhibition to date, and gives insight into the artist’s sensual, profound, and humorous oeuvre, which celebrates constant change and life itself.
Klodin Erb’s art gets under the skin. Layer by layer, viewers dive into her fascinating pictorial worlds. These are both serious and funny, strong and fragile, sensual and reasoned. Klodin Erb’s work reveals diverse metamorphoses with a liberating effect: Neither human nor animal, neither man nor woman, neither young nor old—the characters in her paintings elude traditional thought patterns and categories.
In her expressive, fantastic, and searching pictorial worlds, Klodin Erb explores the possibilities and limits of painting. Her paintings, textile works, films, installations, and collages constantly expand the medium. Driven by the will to transcend conventional boundaries, Klodin Erb takes painting into a three-dimensional world that turns hierarchies on their heads. There, content determines form, and style adapts to the subject. With constantly evolving techniques, the artist “samples” motifs from art and cultural histories and links them to current issues. She activates the past, interweaves it with the present, and thus creates a web where everything is connected. In doing so, Klodin Erb reacts with finely tuned sensitivity to issues and moods in society and media. The artist addresses topics such as transformation, language, sexuality, and ultimately astrology, referring to something greater than ourselves. Her works do not just encourage us to think about art in new terms, but also about our perception of the world. This is how Klodin Erb turns painting into a socially and politically engaged tool of reflexion.
The Aargauer Kunsthaus presents Klodin Erb’s largest institutional solo-exhibition to date, offering an impressive overview of the artist’s oeuvre over the last 30 years. Early textile works meet current, stage-like paintings, highlighting the underlying relationships between the artist’s various creative phases. The exhibition allows us to delve into the artist’s universe, which has been inspired by mythology, pop, and everyday culture, as well as cultural-historical references. The large oeuvre reminds us to remain agile and open in our thinking. The Aargauer Kunsthaus show offers three entrance options and, with them, an invitation to explore Klodin Erb’s work from different perspectives. It is obvious that the artist truly enjoys questioning the rules of the art world's rules while simultaneously challenging our expectations. The route through the exhibition is not straightforward. Root-like, playful and without a beginning and end. Visitors are invited to explore the exhibition space and keep encountering motifs from Klodin Erb’s repertoire: a lemon, a root, emojis, portraits of celebrities, mythological characters, and even the artist herself.
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