Simon Berger Pushes Glass to its Breaking Point: "Shattering Beauty" on the Island of Murano, Venice

Shattered Glass Lion by Simon Berger - Photo: Cat Bauer

(Venice, Italy) Swiss artist Simon Berger uses a hammer as a paintbrush. His canvas is glass. He paints with the blows of a hammer. The closer and briefer the blows of the hammer, the stronger the contrasts and shades. 

Simon Berger has somehow figured out how to hammer glass with a mystical force that shatters the transparent panes into powerful portraits of human and animal faces.

At the time I actually took that photo, above, I saw no majestic lion in the splintered glass cubes arranged in the exhibition space of  the Murano Glass Museum. I saw only shattered glass, the way a windshield would look after a car accident. 

It was only when I was reviewing which images I wanted to use to illustrate this blog post that the tower of broken glass on my iPad magically transformed into the dramatic face of a lion. By chance, I had photographed the shattered glass cubes at an angle that had captured the lion's portrait.

The shattering stroke liberates beauty.
-- Simon Berger

The Museo del Vetro of Murano in Venice is hosting a solo show by Simon Berger from January 28th to May 7th, 2023. The exhibition, entitled "Shattering Beauty," features around twenty original artworks that explore the fragility of the human condition through the splinters of the fragile glass canvases.

Curated by Sandrine Welte and Chiara Squarcina in collaboration with the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and Berengo Studio, the exhibition is conceived as an immersive installation where visitors are invited to lose themselves among glass cubes and sculptures of varying dimensions.

The show features numerous glass portraits created using Berger's singular technique of "morphogenesis" that has put him in the international spotlight: smashing glass with a hammer with such utter precision that the splinters form haunting portraits… almost as if the blows of his hammer releases an image trapped inside the glass.

 "The difficulty of working with glass is also what gives rise to my artworks: its fragility. The material does not allow for corrections. If one hammer blow is not right, I have to discard the whole work. Of course, there is a nervousness when I start a new work. My expectations of myself and the fear of not meeting my requirements sometimes even stops me from starting. In these moments, I try to block out these thoughts and concentrate on the essentials -- my passion for making art and the and soul I put into it."

Shattering Beauty by Simon Berger - Photo: Cat Bauer

Trained as a carpenter, Berger's artistic journey began with a fascination for different materials like wood and metal. He became a street artist, using cans of spray paint as his medium, then started using the carcasses of junked cars as his canvas. As he pondered what to do with the laminated glass windshields, he had an ah-ha moment, took up his hammer, and started carefully cracking the glass into portraits. From the hammer of a carpenter, his remarkable technique was born. 

Simon Berger & Sandrine Welte - Photo: Cat Bauer

I wanted to know how Berger arrived on the Island of Murano in Venice, so I tracked down Sandrine Welte, the co-curator. She told me that Adriano Berengo, President of Berengo Studio, had stumbled upon a YouTube video of Berger cracking his glass and told her to find him -- Beregno Studio is a glass studio on the Island of Murano; Berengo Foundation is an art foundation; and Glasstress is an internationally acclaimed exhibition, all headed by Adriano Berengo, a Venetian entrepreneur who is determined to revive the ancient tradition of Murano glass by infusing it with contemporary energy.

From the Berengo website:

After the success of the exhibition Tony Cragg: Silicon Dioxide at the Museo del Vetro in 2022, Berengo Studio is delighted to be partnering once again with the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia to bring a new exhibition to the island of Murano: Shattering Beauty.

I mentioned to Sandine that Tony Cragg and Simon Berger had the same birthday, April 9th -- I knew this because it is also the birthday of my ex-husband, and I had written about it years ago. They are all Aires, and they are all artists of a kind. To me, using a hammer to crack glass into works of art is the perfect creative use of the headstrong ram-energy that Aires is known for. (I don't know what astrological sign Adriano Berengo is, but I would be curious to find out!) 

Simon Berger in action

Berger's artwork is visually stunning and provocative, and the exhibition is a unique and immersive experience once you figure out that the portraits look different with the naked eye than they do through the lens of a camera. If you don't witness the glass portraits from the correct perspective, it just looks like a bunch of broken glass. I think Simon Berger is some kind of genius. 

"What I like about the face as a motif is that faces are universally recognizable. Everyone knows what a face looks like. It takes very little visual information to make a face recognizable; it is a universal language."

Berger created a shattered glass portrait in front of us by looking at the image of a female in his smartphone held by his left hand while, at the same time, shattering glass with a hammer held in his right hand. 

Afterwards, I asked Berger which way he saw the image while he was creating it -- the way it looked through the camera lens or with the naked eye. "Both. I see portraits everywhere." I asked him who the female was. He said he didn't know. To him, it was simply an interesting face.

Shattering Glass by Simon Berger - Photo: Cat Bauer

Simon Berger's work serves as a testament to the power of creativity and imagination. Through his innovative use of shattered glass, he transforms a symbol of destruction into something beautiful and thought-provoking. "

Shattering Beauty" is at the Venice Glass Museum until May 7, 2023. Take a trip across the Venice lagoon and explore all the voices of glass on the island of Murano, from ancient traditions to contemporary artistic expressions.

Ciao from Venezia,

Cat Bauer

Venetian Cat - The Venice Blog