Simon Berger doesn’t paint portraits. He shatters them into existence. Using a hammer and safety glass, the Swiss artist has spent nearly a decade fracturing surfaces into faces—turning breakage into a drawing technique that relies on impact, stress lines, and light rather than pigment or chisel. It’s a method born from workshop experimentation rather than fine art training, and one that has taken him from his carpenter’s workshop in Niederönz to international institutional recognition.
Berger’s route into art was unconventional. He began working with wood and metal before turning to discarded car windscreens, experimenting with fracture patterns that led to his first glass portraits. What started as curiosity about fracture patterns in safety glass became a signature practice: controlled hammer strikes that produce portraits visible only when illuminated, shifting with every change of angle or light source.
His commissions have included monumental public works—a two-metre installation at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., a presentation at Rome’s Chiesa degli Artisti—and exhibitions at Venice’s Museo del Vetro and Switzerland’s Vitromusée Romont. In 2025, he’s expanded into large-format architectural interventions across Italian churches and civic buildings, transforming fragmentation from portraiture into spatial language. Each piece is unrepeatable—the fracture patterns cannot be duplicated, making every work effectively unique despite the consistent technique. This inherent scarcity, combined with the physical demands of the process, positions his output as both technically challenging and naturally limited.
The trajectory is striking not for its breadth but for its focus. Berger has developed a visual vocabulary that didn’t exist before his experiments began—a technique with no historical precedent in glass art. He’s built a practice that now functions at multiple scales—intimate studio pieces, museum installations, public monuments—while remaining tethered to the fundamental act of controlled destruction.
In the following conversation with The Exclusivist, Berger discusses the curiosity that drove his early experiments, the freedom of arriving at art outside formal systems, and why controlled breaking remains central to his practice.
Q&A With Simon Berger
The Drive to Innovate
Creating a new form of art is rare among living artists, and it often depends as much on mindset as on talent—which certainly seems true for you. You’ve spoken about a persistent quest to create something entirely your own. Beyond that drive to forge your own unique path, what else kept you going—curiosity, sheer confidence in your vision, fearlessness in the face of failure, or something else entirely?
— Creating something truly my own has always been at the core of my practice. It wasn’t about invention for its own sake, but about searching for a language that felt authentic where my gestures and the material could meet honestly. What kept me going was probably a mix of stubbornness and curiosity. I like the moment of not knowing what will happen next, like the crack that surprises you. There’s something raw and alive in that unpredictability. I didn’t start with confidence, exactly. It was more a quiet conviction that there was something there worth pursuing, even if no one else saw it yet.
Early Experimentation and Breaking the Mould
Artists who break new ground are almost never understood at first, sometimes even by those closest to them. When you were doing your very first experiments with glass in the workshop, did you keep it to yourself, or were your family and friends aware of what you were trying to achieve? If so, how did they respond to your ambition at the time?
— Those early days in 2016 in the workshop were quite solitary. I didn’t talk much about what I was doing, not because I wanted to keep it secret, but because it didn’t have a name yet. People close to me were puzzled at first. Glass wasn’t a canvas, and breaking it seemed destructive rather than creative. But once they saw what emerged, the way the cracks formed portraits, like drawings made from light and shadow, there was this shift. Scepticism turned into curiosity. That was important.
Unconventional Path into Art
You entered the art world from a completely unconventional path, outside its traditional structures and expectations, creating a space for yourself on your own terms. Do you think that starting outside the system allowed you to see possibilities others might have missed?
— Yes, I came to art through my hands, through craftsmanship. I didn’t go through the academy or the typical art system, and I think that gave me a kind of freedom. I wasn’t told what was or wasn’t art, or what belonged in a gallery. That meant I could look at something like safety glass and think not how to avoid breaking it, but how to use breaking as a method. That outsider perspective helped me notice things others might not have been looking for.
Perception and Surprise
A work can reveal itself gradually, with new forms, expressions, or patterns emerging only after repeated viewing. Much like a musician returning to a piece and discovering unheard melodies or hidden harmonies, when you step back from your work and revisit it later, do you ever find yourself surprised by aspects you hadn’t noticed before, in a way that echoes the perceptual phenomenon of pareidolia?
— Absolutely. Sometimes I return to a piece and it’s like seeing it for the first time. The human brain loves to find patterns, and I play with that instinct. One day you see a face, another day it’s a gesture or a tension in the cracks. It reminds me of looking at clouds or tree bark—your mood influences what you perceive. I like that. My work should offer something new over time, not just in the first glance.
Public vs. Private Practice
Your public art installations have reached wide audiences and carried substantial cultural visibility. In what ways, if any, have working on these projects shaped your practice, or presented challenges different from those of private commissions or gallery exhibitions?
— Public works demand a different kind of thinking. There’s scale, of course, but also a sense of responsibility. You’re intervening in a shared space. That’s powerful, but also delicate. You can’t control how people interact with it, and I like that challenge. It opens up the work to new readings, different energies. It pushes me to think beyond the object and into its relationship with space, architecture, even urban flow.
Looking Ahead: New Directions
With the 2025 installations clearly taking your work into larger, more architectural territory, and considering your ongoing exploration of new approaches, looking further ahead, do you feel these directions might eventually invite other glass-making traditions into the mix? Or is the act of controlled breaking still the domain you most want to keep exploring and expanding?
— The architectural scale is calling me right now, and I’m exploring how the language of fragmentation can grow into something structural. But I don’t see myself moving away from the act of breaking. It’s too essential. It’s not just a technique, it’s a metaphor. That said, I’m definitely interested in traditional glass practices like blowing, fusing, staining, but perhaps more as a contrast. I like the idea of juxtaposing chaos and control, fragility and force. There’s room to evolve within the crack.
Collections and Influences
Objects can quietly reveal the influences and passions that shape an artist’s perspective. Do you collect art or other items that hold meaning for you? If so, is there one item you treasure above all else?
— I wouldn’t call myself a collector in the traditional sense, but I do surround myself with objects that resonate. These can be tools, raw materials, bits of old industrial objects and artworks. One item I treasure is an old hammer I’ve had since the beginning. It’s worn, dented, but it holds all the energy of past works. It’s a kind of silent witness. For me, objects aren’t just things: they carry stories, memory, presence.
Final Reflections
Simon Berger’s work demonstrates that innovation in contemporary art often emerges where others see only risk. What began as intimate experiments with shattered glass has evolved into a practice that commands both public and institutional attention. Recent projects—the Wynwood Walls commission in Miami and the Lasting Moment exhibitions with Pierre-Alain Münger at Laurent Marthaler Contemporary in Montreux—mark his continued expansion into new contexts and scales.
Berger’s work occupies unusual territory in the contemporary art landscape. The technical process ensures scarcity without artificial limitation—each fracture pattern is unrepeatable, making editions impossible. This inherent uniqueness elevates every piece, whether intimate studio works acquired by private collectors or large-scale commissions for institutions and public spaces. Growing institutional recognition has reinforced what the technique itself guarantees: work that is naturally exclusive, with rarity embedded in the method rather than imposed by strategy.
The method hasn’t changed. Berger still works with a hammer and glass, still relies on controlled fracture to construct images from stress and light. What’s rare is how far that constraint has taken him. Few techniques born in a workshop prove adaptable enough for both intimate galleries and public monuments without losing coherence.
Berger hasn’t diversified to broaden appeal—he’s gone deeper instead. The trajectory suggests he’s far from finished.
Simon Berger Official Website | Instagram | Management
