SIMON BERGER
SIMON BERGER
Simon Berger Simon Berger lives and works in Niederönz, Switzerland
Having devised a revolutionary technique of working glass, Simon Berger proposes a new portraiture in his medium of choice by carving images of great allure from the depth of his vitreous canvases. Against traditional modes of sculpting in three-dimensional ways, his is a ‘painterly‘ gesture that harnesses the affordances of the brittle material in a reversal of long- standing modi operandi. Through bold strokes of a hammer on the glass surface, Simon Berger turns the destructive force of his tool into an amplifier of effects as the resultant cracks and creases form into faces whose piercing expression resonates with the impactful process of ‘morphogenesis‘ as the artist himself refers to his creative ordeal. A sort of anti-creation that speaks to a unique artistic vision Simon Berger has refined over the course of years.
Contrary to expectations of how glass should be handled, Simon Berger exploits its fragility and transparence, constantly pushing its limits against the physical laws of the material - a demonstration of the improbable which ultimately allows for beauty to emerge. Creative intuition, technical skill and continuous innovation characterise Simon Berger‘s practice which probes the expressive capabilities of an inert material commonly destined for factories. His vitreous paintings challenge habits of seeing as the glass canvases become sites where visual perception is held in constant suspense by the deconstructing and reconstructing image. Glass, the most capricious of all media for artistic expression, acts as a place where the force of a unique sculptural gesture translates into depictions of mesmerising appeal. Of exceptional photorealistic allure, these portraits enthral for their expressiveness, as if animated from within and resonating with life.
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“Human faces have always fascinated me“ - Simon Berger asserts. It is this fascination with the face - the canvas of the soul - that lies at the heart of his artistic research which he translates into mesmerising portraits of great allure. Their power thereby resides not only in the expressive force of the sitter‘s eyes but moreover the artist’s material of choice. Glass, one of the hitherto undervalued media for creative endeavours, serves iwith its rich semantics as a starting point for a portraiture of unprecedented kind. The cracks and creases Simon Berger drives into the surface of his vitreous material resonate with the force of powerful incursion, thereby creating an echo that reverberates through the final image he carves and utlimately liberates from the depth of the glass pane. In its dichotomous nature - liquid and solid, transparent and opaque, fragile and strong - glass acts as an animated support for a new hyperrealistic portraiture. A material that lends itself to a double modality of being looked both at and through, it affords a subtle play with and allusion to the innumerable facets that constitute the human psyche and mind. Deemed one of the greatest - for impenetrable and hence unresolved - mysteries, the human condition is revealed in its fragile strength through the artist who virtuously exploits the transparency of the glass pane by daring a glance ‘beyond painting‘. The human face, the most elaborate of all masks, emerges inadvertently in a form of anticreation, coming into being through the shattering stroke of Simon Berger‘s bold artistic gesture. By this revolutionary creative act, modes of seeing and perceiving are questioned as the image constantly hovers between disintegration and reconstitution, intrinsically bound to the viewer‘s perspective. The perceptual challenge Simon Berger confronts the beholder with proves integral to his work, a reversal of common habits of looking rooted in a tradition of the ‘static‘ picture. Instead, his are portraits whose dynamic nature speaks to an aesthetic phenomenology in the perception of art that lives by the concrete, physical experience of the glass canvas. “The artwork is present“, the (new) adage goes. A presence whose seductive force intimately ties beholder to beheld as the vitreous surface turns into a mirror for the viewer to project themselves.
Text by Sandrine Welte
Information
You can find future exhibitions on our page:
You can find Simon Berger’s portfolio here:
Galleries
Selected Press Articles
“Das Spiel mit der Zerbrechlichkeit”, Schweizer Illustrierte, 25.07.2024, by Manuela Donati
Read an article about Simon Berger’s works at Volta Basel 2024:
Venice's magician of glass art, Documentary about Adriano Berengo with interviews by the artists Laure Prouvost, Ai Weiwei, Koen Vanmechelen, Simon Berger, Chila Kumari Burman and Javier Pérez.
By Eike Schmitz for Arte TV
Exhibitions
Solo Exhibition — Monuments — Underdogs Gallery
Solo Exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal
15 November 2024 —28 December 2024
Underdogs presents Monuments, Simon Berger’s first exhibition in Portugal, on view from 15 November to 28 December. Through a new body of work, the renowned Swiss artist — who once dreamed of becoming an architect — pays tribute to the work and vision of some of the most prominent figures in modern and contemporary architecture, such as Jean Nouvel, Peter Zumthor, Mies van der Rohe, and Zaha Hadid, among others. Demonstrating his passion for this discipline, Berger uses these new works to highlight the importance of the contributions made by these pivotal figures, who revolutionised the field of architecture and who have also been a major source of inspiration for him. To mark the opening on 15 November, Simon Berger will do a live performance in the gallery space, while on 13 November, the artist will launch a signed, limited edition exploring a new technique.
Following the launch of a limited edition earlier this year dedicated to the iconic architect and urban planner Le Corbusier, this exhibition takes Simon Berger’s collaboration with Underdogs to new depths. Featuring a total of 17 works, Monuments weaves a surprising narrative about architecture, merging light, aesthetics, and functionality. Three pieces are installations composed of glass bricks, evoking the grandeur of classical structures. Through forms that rise in blocks of glass sculpted with high-pressure sandblasting, Berger offers a perspective on these celebrated architects: their legacy goes beyond the built they have left us. Monuments reflects Simon Berger’s early ambition to become an architect, which led him to train as a carpenter, a path that has shaped his entire artistic practice. Berger developed a singular technique of working glass, in which “anti-creation” – the destructive process of his tools – originates photorealistic figures. Light and fracture interact dynamically in a process the artist calls “morphogenesis”, now revealed in a new and unexpected way.
Text by: Underdogs Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal
©Mike Doorline
©Bruno Lopes
Solo Exhibition — Reverberation — Atelier Richelieu
Solo Exhibition in Paris, France
7 November 2024 —11 November 2024
Agence DS, Icone Gallery and NOA contemproary are delighted to announce that Simon Berger’s next solo exhibition will be held at the Atelier Richelieu from November 7 to 10. In this historic 700 m2 Parisian venue, which has hosted such emblematic events as Paris Photo and Drawing Now, Simon Berger will pay a powerful tribute to Richard Serra with monumental cylindrical sculptures. At the same time, he will devote part of his work to the Olympic Games, with striking portraits of the Olympian gods. Visitors will also be able to rediscover the female faces for which he is renowned, sublimated by the thousand fractures of his hammer.
©David Beyonder
Group exhibition by Berengo Studio and Fondazione Berengo — Glasstress 8 1/2
An extra edition
There is a place where the great artists of the world have passed through in recent decades to measure their creativity with a material steeped in history and seduction:glass. This place is Murano, the island in the Venetian lagoon that has made glassmaking its identity. It is on this remnant of land that their art has taken shape in a workshop that has dedicated its furnaces and the work of its masters to a single purpose, contemporary art. We are of course talking about Berengo Studio.
A vocation that has characterised 35 years of activity, without yielding to the market, and that has characterised the studio from the outset as a partner, culturally and technically equipped to understand and realise the creations conceived by artists.
Artists who enter into a symbiotic relationship with glass masters, creating an exchange of knowledge, ideas, and manual skills, indispensable ingredients to perform the magic of transforming an inert material into the form conceived by the author.
From experience to research, through a foundation that makes its work an accumulation of knowledge available for experimentation and a tool for dissemination, the Fondazione Berengo is in fact also the organiser of events and exhibitions in important museum institutions around the world, together with their own space that houses, on site in Murano, the most significant elements of a constantly evolving production.
Moreover, for the past 16 years, this path has been accompanied by a biennial exhibition in Venice, which constitutes a moment of dynamic synthesis of the achievements of the community of artists who gather around the figure of Adriano Berengo.
To celebrate the thirty-fifth year of activity, an “extra” edition has been set up: eight and a half in fact, because it is a large exhibition that is being held in Murano, allowing visitors to understand where the works are born, to enter into direct contact with the ancient but always new experience of the transfiguration of glass into pure art. Yet in addition, a dedicated space in Venice within one of the Arsenale's 'tese', to offer visitors to the Biennale a mirror of the Murano exhibition.
Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic — Group exhibition by Art Fiaci
Jakup Ferris' (*1981) visual world is colorful and full of happy creatures. People, animals and hybrid creatures do gymnastics, ride their bicycles or whizz through the pictures on a skateboard. Above all, they come together: outside for a picnic, at the family table, dancing, making music or playing chess in the park. Jakup Ferri seems to ask himself while drawing: What else is in a motif? - And in a flash, the buttons on a shirt become seeds that birds are pecking at. His works sparkle with graphic wit and narrative joy.
The Kosovan artist cultivates a linear style, the outlines are in the foreground and frame the bold colors. Based on drawings, Jakup Ferri creates paintings and has his pictorial inventions woven or embroidered. He draws inspiration from microorganisms, folk art, arts and crafts, art brut and the pixel world of computer games. In his installations, he overlays carpets with abstract-concrete patterns, embroidered drawings and paintings to create a dense cosmos full of stories.
Museo Civici di Treviso Casa Robegan — Facing Grace
Taking inspiration from Antonio Canova‘s revolutionary artistic work for the exhibition at the Musei Civici di Treviso, Simon Berger endeavours a new take on the complex oeuvre by the Italian sculptor whose importance and value for art continues to resonate today. In consideration of the intricate link between the city of Treviso and Canova’s birthplace in Possagno, Facing Grace engages with Canova‘s unique sculptural idiom by transposing his own aesthetic research into the human form to the repertoire of mythological narrative, studied in great detail by the Neoclassical artist.
The point of departure for the body of works presented thereby becomes Canova’s The Three Graces, an outstanding example of sculptural virtuosity in terms of composition and movement. United in their elegant posture and delicate beauty, the three goddesses are lost in an affectionate embrace as they face each other. Their peaceful balance speaks to their allegorical nature of mirth, youthful beauty and elegance as they altogether appear to exude an air of joyous lightness of being. From their physical appearance as a sculptural group of three, they are translated to a new corporeal shape in lines of cracks and creases through Simon Berger‘s ‘morphogenesis‘-technique.
Engaging with canons of beauty, the Swiss artist creates various installations that revolve around notions of the sublime, allowing for its many faces to appear. Glass, his material of choice, thereby acts as a medium to play with modes of perception, allowing for a both literal and metaphorical deconstruction and synthesis of the underlying mythological accounts. Layers of meaning are thus orchestrated into a comment on ‘facing grace‘ as his two-dimensional sculptural portraits invite a look beyond the surface in a virtual encounter with his vitreous drawings - in search of the beautiful.
Text by Sandrine Welte
©Jessica Zufferli
City of Paris in Collaboration with Agence DS — Tosca
After a solo exhibition at the Museo del Vetro in Murano, the creation of the portrait of Kamala Harris exhibited at the Lincoln Museum in Washington, and a vibrant tribute to the British writer Aldous Huxley at the Museo Municipale in Sansepolcro, it is opposite the Opéra Comique in Paris, one of France's oldest theatrical and musical institutions, that Simon Berger is installing his new creation.
Simon Berger's unique technique consists of multiple hammer blows, directed and controlled, on glass surfaces to sculpt shapes and create striking figures. Inspired by the place given to operatic heroines, the true guardians of the Opéra Comique, Simon Berger wanted to pay tribute to Tosca, one of the most famous and demanding female characters in the Italian opera repertoire. In doing so, he has added a contemporary perspective that complements the two statues in the theatre's main hall, those of Carmen (by Guiraud-Rivière) and Manon (by Mercié).
This sculpture pays tribute to this emblematic character on the very spot where he first appeared in Paris on 13 October 1903, exactly 120 years ago.
It was at the Opéra Comique that the first - and highly controversial - French performance of Giacomo Puccini's Manon took place, recounting the tragic fate of a famous opera singer, mistress of a painter and victim of his passion. Simon Berger's striking sculpture captures the emotional intensity of Tosca, both in the power of her gaze and in her fragility, evoked by the broken glass.
Commenting on his portraits of women in broken glass, Simon Berger says: “The women I sculpt are not only luminous, they are light itself. Immaterial, their features are engraved deep in the glass, whose finesse captures every nuance of their emotions, even the most fleeting, for eternity.”
This open-air exhibition, accessible to all free of charge, is the fruit of a collaboration between Simon Berger and the Mairie de Paris, and confirms the City of Paris' desire to use public spaces to bring art to as many people as possible.
©Salome Bellin
Museo Civico di Sansepolcro — The Doors of Perception
Solo exhibition curated by Sandrine Welte and Pasquale Lettieri
Cris Contini Contemporary and Lo Studiolo d'Arte, present THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION, the solo show of Swiss sculptor Simon Berger curated by Sandrine Welte and Prof. Pasquale Lettieri on display at the Civic Museum of Sansepolcro.
In this exhibition sponsored by the Municipality of Sansepolcro and the Department of Culture, Simon Berger embraces the artistic heritage of the city as a starting point for a commentary that develops from a 1925 essay by Aldous Huxley, in which the author describes Piero della Francesca's Resurrection as ‘the greatest painting in the world’, thus saving it from the bombings of World War II. It was later, in his autobiographical account that the English writer reexamined the Renaissance artist’s work with respect to drapery, thereby opening the semantics of contemplation to new modes of seeing. With The Doors of Perception, the Swiss artist undertakes to investigate these very mechanisms of the beholding mind, that solitary universe in which the infinite vagueness of imagination and conception come together.
Through an immersive, box-like installation of glass canvases, the labyrinthine structures of the human intellect are replicated, playing with the illusion of sight and the seduction of the senses.
©Laura Scatena
Museo del Vetro Murano —
Shattering Beauty
The exhibition Simon Berger: Shattering Beauty, organised in collaboration with Berengo Studio at the Museo del Vetro, contains a series of new portraits by the artist in glass, presenting his pioneering technique to the Venetian lagoon for the very first time. In his hyper realistic portraits Berger recreates the lines of the human face by breaking the material. In a mesmerising process he refers to as “morphogenesis,” he re-situates the medium as an animated “canvas,” using sculptural tools such as a hammer to physically work at its surface to “etch” and “draw” haunting human faces. Reinforced safety glass, which holds at its core a crucial layer of plastic, ensures that the material, though broken, stays in place.
This highly controlled sculptural technique originates from the artist’s classical training in carpentry, and is a moving example of how many artists are now translating techniques from other mediums into the world of glass. Berger’s unique technique of deliberate “shattering,” contradicts years of teaching, whereby broken glass has been seen as wasted or ruined. On the contrary, he instead turns the material’s so-called weakness into its most vital asset. Its ability to break becomes reframed as its ability to change, to be altered, and to be recast as something new. To watch the artist create these works is to witness a vivid “performance,” not dissimilar to that of the glass maestros in the furnace. In a way, Berger’s craft provides an enticing extension of tradition, continuing the animated life of glass, into what had previously been viewed as its death.
The exquisite shattering of Berger’s work becomes representative of how powerful revitalising and reanimating our own relationship to the material can be. Each artwork becomes a reminder of the process of breaking down barriers, a physical urge encouraging audiences to view glass – and the world within which it exists – in a different way. The trauma and pain typically associated with broken glass are inverted. The shattering of the material is not an end point for Berger: it is just the beginning.
©Jörg Häfeli
Sculpture Garden Biennale Geneva — Group Exhibition
Biennale group exhibition
Contemporary glass artist Simon Berger speaks a singular visual language as he explores the depths of his material, glass, which he cracks and splits with a hammer. The pane of glass becomes the support for an expansion achieved by impacts that play with transparency. The closer and shorter the blows, the stronger the contrasts and nuances. In his hands, the hammer is not a tool of destruction, but rather an amplifier of effects. Berger began his artistic explorations with aerosol cans before turning to other media. Trained as a carpenter, his natural attraction to wood inspired his first urban art creations. A keen mechanic, he also spent a lot of time working on crashed vehicles. It was while thinking about what to do with a car windscreen that his art was born. "Human faces have always fascinated me," explains Simon. "On safety glass, these patterns seem to come to life and attract visitors as if by magic. It's a discovery, where abstract mist meets figurative perception.
