"The idea of an intimate connection between food and artists (and their art) is not new: magnificent are the analyses that the author Gertrude Stein—sometimes with the help of her cook Hélène, sometimes with her friend Alice B. Toklas—arrives at in characterising, for example, the personalities of Picasso and Matisse through their eating habits. In Grate's case, however, the relationship is somewhat more complicated.

Just as he has been collecting shards of pottery, roots, stones, and other objets trouvés since the 1920s, sometimes to assemble them into a kind of sculptural collage, sometimes to find starting points for sculpture in this 'ancient world of forms' (to speak with him), so too has Eric Grate been stimulated by the skeletal remains of fish from a Parisian market (primarily bones from the head of a pike!) to create a forms that are both architecturally and humanly associative, populated by grim sculptural figures akin to fetishes and idols, and like these, created directly from nature itself.

Nature is an important incentive for this motif, which the artist has called the Esox's gardens: here are the stones and roots, of course, but also the tops of birch and spruce trees that, when one lies on their back and gazes up at them, can easily take the shape of shadowy knights and riders. And with the treetops, the clouds, which at least for a brief moment of their short existence take on individual characteristics, but which otherwise, in their soft merging into themselves and into one another, can be seen as a timeless and general expression of the need for tenderness, contact, and fusion.

The Dada-surrealist Arp once said: 'Art should lose itself in nature. It should even be confused with nature.'

It is this world, sketched above, that forms the background to Eric Grate's sculptures from his second, longer sejour in Paris." (Pontus Grate, Ragnar von Holten, from "Eric Grate", SAK, 1978)