Swiss-born artist Boris Gratry explores the tension between destruction and beauty through sculptural works that transform the discarded remnants of consumer culture. Working primarily with automobile parts, Gratry subjects hoods, doors, and other industrial components to intense heat, fire, water, and oxidation, allowing physical and chemical forces to fundamentally alter their form, surface, and materiality. The resulting works are burned, rusted, calcined, and embellished with gold leaf. They exist between sculpture, installation, and performance.
Strongly influenced by Arte Povera and Post-Minimalism, Gratry’s practice questions the values and systems of mass production and consumption. The automobile, an enduring symbol of industrial progress, mobility, and programmed obsolescence, becomes a material for transformation: an object produced through standardized manufacturing is rendered singular through fire, chance, and the passage of time. Gratry’s process is deliberately improvisational, with the artist establishing conditions in which natural forces participate in the making of each work.
This embrace of transformation and imperfection connects Gratry’s practice to Japanese aesthetics, particularly the principles of wabi-sabi and the ceramic tradition of raku. Like raku, his works undergo dramatic temperature changes that alter both their form and surface, producing unpredictable variations in color and texture. Rust, calamine, and oxidation are not treated as defects but as essential components of the work, recording the effects of time and the elemental forces that have shaped it. Gold leaf introduces a contrasting element of permanence, luxury, and preciousness, while recalling kintsugi; the Japanese practice of repairing broken ceramics with gold and honoring the history of the object through its scars.
Across Gratry’s work, opposing forces such as opulence and decay, fragility and durability, brutality and beauty, precious and ordinary, are brought into productive tension. His sculptures transform icons of consumerism into relics that seem at once archaeological and futuristic, evoking imagined post-industrial and post-apocalyptic landscapes. In this sense, destruction becomes a generative act: the industrial object is stripped of its original function and reborn as a singular artwork.
Gratry’s installations extend these concerns into immersive environments and scenographic structures. Guided by his principle that “form follows context,” his practice considers the relationship between material, architecture, environment, and human experience. His installations often invite contemplation while simultaneously confronting the environmental and cultural consequences of consumer society.
Boris Gratry earned a professional degree in Interior Design from the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD) and a Bachelor of Arts in Exhibition and Stage Design from the Institute of Interior Design and Scenography at FHNW in Basel. During his studies, he collaborated with Group8 Architects on projects including Art Basel 2010 and an ICRC logistics complex. He subsequently worked in the competition department of Atelier Brückner, an international exhibition design studio in Stuttgart, on projects including the Shanghai Natural History Museum. He later joined the Geneva Opera House as an assistant stage manager for productions including Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier and Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio. Todd Merrill Studio began representing Gratry in 2019.
