The Museo Nivola is delighted to present the exhibition Isidro Ferrer. Other People’s Book, the Spanish illustrator and graphic designer’s first solo exhibition at an Italian institution.
Born in Madrid in 1963, Isidro Ferrer is a legend in the world of contemporary graphic design, creator of a style distinguished for powerful visuals, irony, and intelligent use of metaphor and typographical experimentation. His work for major cultural institutions, brands, and publishing houses across the world has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Premio Nacional de Diseño (2002) and Premio Nacional de Ilustración (2006). Ferrer’s images are created using an original, evocative method: starting from the designated theme, he creates sculptures in his studio using found objects, scrap metal and wood, and apparently insignificant items, assembling them to create unexpected and surprising forms.
In his work, Ferrer draws on the concept of pareidolia, the instinctive tendency of the brain to recompose abstract or chance compositions into familiar and meaningful images. Just as we can see the shape of a person or animal in a cloud in the sky or a rock in a landscape, Isidro Ferrer needs only to arrange three dots in a triangle to evoke a face, scrub, a beard, a bicycle seat, or the sly muzzle of a fox. He then takes photographs of the sculptures against clean, neutral backgrounds, arranging them into elegant visual puns to maximise the effectiveness of the communication.
At the crossroads between artisan experimentation, photographic practice, and digital reformulation, the objects and posters interact to create enigmatic images that, through a simple language, almost like a whisper that informs rather than imposes, stimulate the viewer’s sense of play and inspire reflection.
Although also active in the commercial sphere, Ferrer prioritizes cultural and social communication for theatre, cinema, and music, working in a terrain of exploration and communication linked to human thought. A special place in his practice is reserved for book illustration, spanning poetry, non-fiction, and literature for adults and children and collaborating with writers and poets from across the world. In his books, Ferrer works in an extraordinary range of styles, hues, and iconographies, making him one of the most interesting illustrators on the international scene.
