Eric Grate (1896-1983) was a Swedish sculptor who also worked as a painter and graphic artist. He is best known for his public works across Sweden and for the controversy caused by one of his sculptures in Solna in the late 1950s.
He studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1917 to 1920. He then made study trips to Germany, especially Munich, and to Italy and Greece. In 1924 he moved to Paris, where he spent ten years in the company of other Swedish artists, among them Nils Dardel, Isaac Grünewald and Otte Sköld. From 1941 to 1951 he taught as a professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts.
Grate received many commissions for public art in Sweden, including the iron urn Mines District Urn in Gothenburg, the relief Seasons at Rosenbad, the Government Chancellery in Stockholm, and four reliefs on the extension of Gothenburg City Hall designed by Gunnar Asplund. His most famous work is Entomological Raping, placed outside the Karolinska Institutet in Solna towards the end of the 1950s. Most of the faculty protested that it was indecent, and the dispute was only settled when the Swedish Superior Court of Administrative Matters ruled in favour of the sculpture.
Grate said that his first encounter with Greek sculpture at Olympia had a decisive effect on him, leading him to rethink how he built his sculptures. His legacy lies mainly in Sweden's urban spaces, where many of his pieces still stand in squares, parks and public buildings.