Reviews

Anne Fellner

Klodin Erb at Aargauer Kunsthaus

On the 8th of October, 2025 I take a train from Zurich to Aarau to visit Klodin Erb’s exhibition Vorhang fällt Hund bellt at Aargauer Kunsthaus. As a fourth-generation Argovian painter (though I’ve never lived there myself) this endeavor feels dangerously close to a quest.

In its entirety the exhibition is a wild ride of emotions. There are moments of aversion, admiration, adoration, and even agony. Comedy runs throughout, never without critique. The title itself is a punchline—one that only fully lands once you go.

Installation view: Klobin Erb, Leda und der Schwan, 2024, Aargauer Kunsthaus. Photo Credit: David Aebi

Tucked away in the south-east corner of the exhibition, obscured by a massive paravent depicting constellations of the night sky, the painting series Leda and the Swan (2024) shimmers in the half-light. The big question, of course, is: how did they actually do it? Zeus disguised as a swan, and Leda as Leda. Erb explores a range of positions on dime-store canvases of varying formats, as if testing what’s still possible within the myth’s tired erotic machinery.

There’s no shortage of lewd Leda and the Swan imagery in the history of art with Boucher’s version probably the most perverted—the swan gazing straight into the young Leda’s vagina (and we all know what a swan’s neck looks like). Immediately, the question of the artist arises: what does it mean to paint a scene of pornographic rape and then sell it, let alone buy it? 

It might seem stale to rehash scenes from the canon, but if Matthieu Malouf can paint a Leda in 2024 and replace the swan with a penguin, then surely it’s all up for grabs. The question is whether that, too, isn’t passé. Then again, we wonder the same about painting itself. 

Installation view: Klobin Erb, Leda und der Schwan, 2024, Aargauer Kunsthaus. Photo Credit: David Aebi

What are swans anyway, with their long, twisty, sinewy necks and immaculate feathers? Perhaps the campest of birds—except, of course, for the oddball penguin in its tuxedo, who gets all the laughs. Erb’s choice of Prussian blue, titanium white, gold, silver, and glitter is camp in itself: a palette that both seduces and, dare I say, repulses. The best kind of painting, perhaps.

By nature, the swan is the perfect motif for painterly manifestation—an oily daub of creamy white or black extended by a signature capital letter S-shaped brushstroke, recalling inverted keyholes or question marks. Questions unanswered, eyes peering inward, iconic symbolism for a self-reflexive medium.

Silver and gold gleam in the dim light of the space. But why dim the lights at all? To create a sensual, sexy environment? There’s something comical about hiding the mythological scenes behind the paravent, lit from behind like an overgrown nightlight. It offers both shelter and illumination—all the better to lap up the inky scenes in semi-private, as they emerge and drip from their metallic backgrounds, satisfying our pervy imagination.

Klobin Erb, Orlando #167, 2020, Kunstsammlung Kanton Zürich. Photo Credit: Stefan Altenburger

My dreamy reverie is crushed as I enter the next space. The sheer brightness of the neons and density of works are overwhelming. The inversion has been inverted—from the walls, eyes now peer out at me as I dart through the space like a microbe under a microscope. My escape route leads through a glass door into the Kunsthaus courtyard, where a doghouse awaits. The title of the work is Cerberus (2021). Another mythological creature: the hound of Hades that guards the underworld. It barks, and I hastily retreat.

This time I steel myself before reentering the gallery. It’s not you, it’s me, I think as I make my way to the bench in the center of the room and gather my bearings. A light, watery blue swathe of color is applied directly onto the walls and drips down to the floor. Small-format portraits hang atop it, salon-style. They feature not only humans but also animals: sheep, cow, cat, dog. In some paintings, the faces are overpainted with geometric forms; while elsewhere, an evil clown appears, several robots, and a tree whose trunk looks uncannily visage-like. 

The series is titled Orlando (2013–2021) and takes its name from Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel about a man born in Elizabethan England who lives for over five centuries and changes their sex along the way. While the subjects of the portraits are incredibly diverse, the treatment of paint is mainly alla prima—a style that must be rendered quickly, wet-in-wet, proof of a busy painter. Each brushstroke maintains both a form-giving and color-mixing function. However, things can go sideways if you fuss too much or use a brush that’s not clean. Colors and shapes suddenly turn blah. 

There are no cover-ups here. Some faces have been garbled beyond recognition, amorphous blobs of indescribably mediocre tonality. Others are pristine in the freshness of their rendition, brushstrokes glistening as if still wet. The paintings’ forensics pull us back into the moment of their making, the very instant of fumble, of success, the crime scene itself. Once again, the viewer is made witness. 

Installation view: Klobin Erb, Orlando, 2013-2021, Aargauer Kunsthaus. Photo Credit: David Aebi

Gaze is a central question in painting: who paints whom, and how—and again for whom? Am I Erb, staring back into eyes just rendered or just erased? Or Erb, looking back across nine years of work? Or am I Erb’s subject, feeding the narrative? Time is suspended in paint and I’m trap-gazed by the artist, as usual. 

Diving deeper into the show, I find myself in the most conservative space of the exhibition. (Cum-painted-cross, oh let me repent.) And so, it’s the only room where the works are displayed in standard fashion. Erb’s palette also shifts here, taking on the somber, rich tones of biblical representation à la Renaissance, or the dark, morbid contrasts of a Goya still life. A plucked chicken dons a colander like a knight’s helmet. A woman softly plays the flute from beneath an opaque veil, while another takes a shower in the middle of a scriptural scene, and  a Düreresque rabbit looks on confused. 

I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve stepped into one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books I adored as a kid, where every turn matters and each story has multiple endings. What if I flipped the timeline and visited the last space first? But doesn’t repentance come after judgement and sin? I’m in too far, I can’t unsee, Erb’s hooks go too deep. 

The earthy tonality of the works in this room grounds me, and with a kind of beatific acceptance I contemplate what I first take to be a scumbled rendition of the Tower of Babel set in a moody landscape. Looking closer, I notice something staring back at me and wonder if it might be … a Furby.