The Persistence of Presence is Simon Berger's exhibition at the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo — on view from 12 September to 10 October 2026, realised with the support of the Swiss Embassy. More than a century separates two Swiss artists: Ferdinand Hodler, the country's foremost painter, and Berger, who makes portraits with a hammer. Their meeting place is Sarajevo — the Gallery holds an extraordinary collection of Hodler's studies and sketches, fleeting sheets safeguarded by its curators through the war. Berger copies none of them: he imagines how the faces Hodler only outlined might have looked, and carries their lines forward across a century, struck into glass.

At the centre is the human face. Hodler's sheets hold contours that had begun to fade — on paper as much as in memory; Berger gives them their outline back, in portraits from intimately small to larger than life, so that presence itself becomes the subject. Glass forgives nothing: a strike cannot be corrected, softened, or painted over — the finished portrait must already stand before the artist's inner eye, each fracture's path through the pane anticipated. The searching that fills Hodler's sketchbooks, study after study, is compressed here into the moment before the hammer falls: one practice is thinking made visible, preserved sheet by sheet; the other, thinking held invisible until a single, unrepeatable pass makes it permanent.

The presence extends into the space itself: rhythmically hung panels and staggered panes of glass take up central Hodler motifs — the face of his wife Berthe, the Youth Admired by Women, the Lumberjack — and let them emerge piece by piece, echoing Hodler's own principle of Parallelism, repetition as a pictorial force. That it is the Lumberjack that recurs, that emblem of strength and labour, carries a quiet meaning of its own: Berger trained as a carpenter.

Among the new works is a portrait of Azra Begić — the curator known as "Madame Hodler", who cared for Sarajevo's Hodler paintings for decades. When the Gallery came under shelling in the war, it was the dedication of its staff, Begić foremost among them, and of the refugees sheltering in its basement that brought the collection through: not one of Hodler's paintings was lost. Her portrait, from paper to glass, honours her — and all who protected what could so easily have vanished. The title names what holds this dialogue together: the endurance of a presence over time, from paper to glass, from one generation of artists to the next.