SIMON BERGER

Simon Berger (b. 1976, Switzerland) works in his studio in Niederönz. His artistic practice emerged from a foundation in carpentry and street art. In the early years, he explored portraiture with spray paint, then moved to wooden sculpture, and later began assembling discarded vehicle components.
 

This trajectory of experimentation led to a pivotal moment in 2016 when, while considering what to do with an old car windshield, he recognised something unexpected in its fractured surface - the outline of a face, already there in the broken glass. This observation would reshape his entire artistic
direction.
 

From this initial intuition, Berger spent years refining a technique that had never before existed as a sustained artistic practice: the creation of figurative images through controlled impact on laminated safety glass. The method is deceptively simple in description but technically demanding in execution.

Two or more sheets of float glass bonded by a transparent polymer interlayer form the surface. A hammer becomes the instrument. Each controlled blow produces a web of fractures whose brightness, density and direction depend precisely on the angle, force and point of impact. By composing hundreds
of such strikes in sequence, tonal fields and contours emerge. What might be regarded as the weakness of the material - its fragility, its tendency to break - becomes its greatest strength: the very mechanism through which the image becomes visible.

The human face is Berger's primary subject, particularly women's faces that carry quiet intensity and presence. The transparency of glass makes the work dependent on light - different hours of day reveal different depths of the image, different angles shift the relationship between viewer and subject. This instability is intentional. The work exists in constant perceptual fluctuation, never fully fixed, never the same from moment to moment. In this way destruction and creation are held in suspension. The fractures are the only trace of the artist's hand; no material is added, no surface is
built up.

 

The image is liberated from within the very act of breaking, and what emerges has the expressiveness of life held in broken light.