[1] He is known as a master of the color field style of abstract painting, closely related to abstract expressionism, in which he creates tension between a defined surface structure, his own method of applying paint to a canvas, and the relationship of various shades of white or color to each other in their placement as part of a composition on the flat plane of a canvas.
[7][8] In 1967, he took his first sojourn in the United States, where, in an intensive personal confrontation with landscape and architecture and their mythological meaning, he reduced the use of forms and colors in his works.
He was interested particularly in the boundaries of connections; in the formation of space without perspective; and in the underlayment of white and, later, colored surfaces with paint layers of barely perceptible varying tonality.
[11] There he hung an unpainted canvas behind a wall of stretched gauze and illuminated it with a halogen light from the front and the back sides, thus producing the illusion of an actual painting.
[12][13] In 1975, Erben moved to Düsseldorf, where he is a neighbor of the artist Günther Uecker,[12] without relinquishing his house in Goch on the lower Rhine.
In 1988 Erben returned to stricter geometrical image partitions in his works, which display a clear connection to the early "weiße Bilder".
A comparable, but even more enhanced, space and light effect is developed in the work group "Siria" from 2009 to 2010, which harkens back to a journey he made in 2007 through the desert landscapes of Syria.
As of 2014, through muted color transitions, Erben brings immaterial movement and simultaneously luminous quietude into his paintings, which are designated by the collective title "Festlegung des Unbegrenzten" ["Fixing of the Unbounded"].