SPARK Art Fair

Booth G3 – Klodin Erb

Klodin Erb shows at the SPARK Art Fair Vienna paintings from the Flowers for Sale series. These are intriguing flower paintings, which allude to the selling off of nature. The pictures were all created on plasticized tablecloths, whose motifs Klodin Erb artfully continued, altered or added new elements to. She reworked the printed patterns to varying degrees. In some pictures, the floral background is hardly recognizable anymore, so the pattern has been overpainted and changed; in others, the printed colors and drawings are clearer and an essential part of the pictorial inventions. Klodin Erb deals with these different layers of reality – the artificial printed plastic ground and her own subtle painterly settings – in a sovereign manner. She traverses the different levels of reality with a sure conviction. This impression of a world in floating appearance is reinforced by Klodin Erb's chosen arrangement of the individual paintings on different hanging heights, held together by a silvery iridescent wall painting with further floral motifs. Nature is the overarching theme. Both in the choice of motifs and in the painterly style, cross-references can be made to her earlier groups of works. As always, painting is put to the test in Klodin Erb’s work: She finds a form in which painting, in this case the burdened genre of the flower painting, can assert itself in the digital present.

Klodin Erb is one of the best-known Swiss painters of her generation. In her expressive, fantastic visual worlds, the artist reacts seismographically to the social and medial atmospheres and situations of the present. Thereby the theme often determines the form: In accordance with the specific topic, the artist uses different painting techniques; she underlines, emphasizes, accentuates and thus interweaves form and content to maximum expressiveness and painting power. Her works are always set in the now. Formal influences come from popular and net culture as well as art history, combined with a great love for experimentation and a continuous exploration of the boundaries of painting. Time and again, Klodin Erb explores other media such as film, installation or drawing. These ventures prove to be very inspiring and fruitful for new pictorial inventions, which the artist then in turn incorporates into her painting.

Klodin Erb lives and works in Zurich and is a lecturer at the Department of Design & Art at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Her works are represented in numerous public and private collections worldwide and are regularly exhibited in museums including the Helen Dahm Museum, Oetwil am See, 2022 (s), Museum Langmatt, Baden, 2022 (g), Centre culturel suisse, Paris, 2022 (g), Museum im Bellpark, Kriens, 2020 (g), Kunst Museum Winterthur, 2019 (g), Kunstmuseum Solothurn 2019 (g), Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, 2018 (s), Kunstmuseum Luzern, 2017 (g), Kunstmuseum Bern, 2017 (g), Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, 2014 (g), Haus für Kunst Uri, Altdorf, 2011 (g), Kunst(Zeug)Haus, Rapperswil, 2010 (g), Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen, 2008 (s).

www.klodinerb.com

Franziska Furter always works meticulously: Like a researcher she experiments and expands her image making and invents objects. In her works she remains always tangible as an acting person. Art is for her the process of making, a credo she shares with Marcel Duchamp. Franziska Furter often creates in her exhibition installations, captivating the viewer through their precise disposition of different groups of works in manifold material. All works broach the issues of perception of time and play with the criteria of planning, concept and coincidence. Her exhibitions reveal an oeuvre constantly growing with unexcited consistency, with humor and precision. Within a clearly defined system Franziska Furter creates works of great forcefulness and poetry, offering in her shows to the viewer a variety of associations and emotions.