Isabelle Ferreira

Isabelle Ferreira conveys in her work processes and references that she intentionally uses against their usual purpose. As a sculptor, she likes using the cut as a means of production of paintings, or rather of reliefs. As a drawer and colorist, she challenges the materiality of the drawing in favor of its cutting, its tearing or its leftovers. The attack alters the surface or lacerates it until it is reduced to pieces or residues. Here, to attack must be understood as the beginning of an action, of an intervention whose intensity aims at modifying or altering its object, but also as an attempt to destroy it to a greater or lesser extent, yet without reaching total destruction. Because even if it destroys and lacerates, it carries the reliefs or the sign of an energy within its remains, the colourful brightness of what one could name staccato of the drawing. The scrap and the fragment are also a way of re-composing through the color, the incision or the attachment: what will create the painting or even the staple that fixes and/or joins can also be the sketch of a line, and cover by multiplication. Using little means is neither incompatible with the expressiveness and the productive force of the energy, nor with the assumed simplicity and the complexity of perceptions. The scraping and the cut or the tear become the drawing tools, the color an assertion of the layout and the staple can be the “morpheme” of a shape, of a skin or of a colour. Philippe Cyroulnik, art critic and curator

Her work was exhibited in 2014 at Open Sky Museum of Eden Morfaux (Saint Herblain), in 2015 at the Friche Belle de Mai (Marseille) and the Abbey Saint-Hubert (Belgium) for Art@Work, and in 2017 at Château d’Oiron. She has received several institutional grants and awards and has been a resident at the Cité des Arts in Paris, Location One in New York, the Terra Foundation in Giverny, Astérides in Marseille or the Domaine de Kerguéhennec. In 2018, she completed a residency at the Anni and Josef Albers Foundation in Ireland. In 2019, she is the winner of a public commission for the city of Vitry-sur-Seine. In 2021, she obtained her second individual creation grant from the Drac Ile de France as well as the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Grant. In 2022, she receives the Ekphrasis Grant from the ADAGP.

Her work can also be found in the collection of the Beaux-Arts de Nantes, the FRAC Normandie-Caen, the FRAC Auvergne, the FRAC Poitou-Charentes, the Albers Foundation, the CNAP (National center of plastic arts), the Fonds d'art contemporain – Paris Collections, the Graphic and photographic fund of the city of Vitry-sur-Seine. In 2019, she won the 1% public commission of Vitry sur Seine.

In 2023, she will have a solo show at MAAT Museum in Lisboa.