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delve into the artist’s universe, which has been inspired by mythology, pop, and everyday culture, as well as cultural-historical references.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.
Klodin Erb
Klodin Erb was born in Winterthur in 1963. In 2022, she received the prestigious Prix Meret Oppenheim award. She lives and works in Zürich.
Her works are represented in the collections of various museums, including the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Kunst Museum Winterthur, the Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen, the Kunsthaus Biel Centre d’Art Bienne, the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, as well as numerous public and private collections.
Her most important solo-exhibitions include Toutes le savent, même les anges at the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, A different kind of furs in the Istituto Svizzero, Rome, Die Wolfslaterne at Kunsthaus Biel Centre d’Art Bienne, and Das Mädchen der Bär das Tier auf dem Möbel at the Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen. She was represented in group exhibitions, such as Undersea. Art and life beneath the waves, Hastings Contemporary, Le Chant des Sirènes, Académie de France à Rome – Villa Medici, Rome, Un(certain) Ground. Aktuelle Malerei in der Schweiz, Kunsthaus Biel Centre d’Art Bienne, TSCHÜÜSS festival, Centre culturel suisse, Paris, After Bob Ross: Beauty Is Everywhere, Museum im Bellpark, Kriens, Yellow Creature. Aspekte der Transformation, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Die Augen der Bilder – Porträts von Fragonard bis Dumas, Museum Langmatt, Baden, Docking Station, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau.
Publication
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication that combines the concepts of an artist book and exhibition catalogue into one. The pages of the publication are split down the middle, allowing for an infinite, kaleidoscopic combination of images and text. The publication contains texts by Céline Eidenbenz and Elise Lammer to further explore Klodin Erb’s work, as well as a Dictionnaire, a personalised dictionary by the Swiss author Eva Seck. In a literary response to the pictorial world created by Klodin Erb, the terms in the publication can be combined freely with the illustrations—just like the so-called cadavre exquis, the surrealistic game that celebrates the art of chance. In her article, Elise Lammer focuses, for the first time, on the textile material in the artist’s work, while co-curator Céline Eidenbenz takes a look at aspects of transformation and metamorphosis. The publication was designed by Teo Schifferli in Zürich. It is published by Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Vienna, 2025.
