Biography
Guy Ferrer (b. 1955), a Frenchman of Mediterranean origin, has worked mainly in Paris and Los Angeles, and in several countries where he set up temporary studios, including New York, Caracas, Lima, Beijing and Johannesburg.
His move to French Catalonia in 2012 marked his return to the Mediterranean. Devoted mainly to sculpture and painting, the artist also explores writing and architecture. Spirituality, Time, life and its questions are all themes that nourish his work and his philosophy.
Since the 1980s, Guy Ferrer has built an international career marked by exhibitions in many galleries and institutions.
The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned the artist to create a monumental bronze sculpture for the French Embassy in Singapore, a large painted fresco for the French Embassy in Baku (Azerbaijan) and a sculpture for the Ministry's central site in Paris, among other works.
The OECD commissioned, and permanently displays, the large triptych Liberté-Égalité-Fraternité.
Artistic partnerships have been formed with several companies, including Lefranc & Bourgeois, Le Bon Marché, Champagne Nicolas Feuillatte and Champagne Jacquart, as well as Bordeaux wine estates.
"A great traveller, he draws on the many periods he has spent working abroad for the human substance that animates his work and breathes its spirit into it.
Passionate about the world's spiritual traditions, he offers us, with great power, his sensitive and poetic vision of Man, caught in Time and facing the dialectic of his paradoxical destiny: for Ferrer, man is made at once of light and of mud, and the path of life is one of initiation."
What the artist says:
"A lifelong commitment: to create, to live in order to create, in a constant state of renewal – that is exactly what art means to me, a total commitment and a testimony.
Through all the explorations that art allows, I improvise as I search, 'self-taught' as they say, as if it could be any other way! One has to negotiate with the material, to give in order to receive. It is a subtle relationship; harmony is rare and, when it comes, it is always a surprise. What a joy it is, now and then, to find the right answers to questions of aesthetics and form. And above all to the question of the meaning of what one does. From time to time one finds them, but always provisionally. For what always comes back, and with such force, is the demand of the path, where each finished work commands you to move on to another, one that might be truer, where other answers might exist. One must remain receptive, like a cup, with an open heart. There is always something to be learned, whether about art or about the nature of the world. Art is a magical source of knowledge and intuition. It holds a few secrets, whispered from the other side of the visible, as if granted by the Great Mystery.
Practising, working: this is no doubt the best way to grow a little, to share with others, to hear a breath of meaning colour existence, and to sweep away the idle quarrels over beauty and harmony, those eternal forces."
Baku (Azerbaijan), 20 June 2000