The Power of Touch: Artist Talk with Anne Ferrer

The Power of the Touch: Artist Talk with Anne Ferrer

French-Catalan textile artist Anne Ferrer will explore the challenges of occupying space—whether public spaces, the art world, the city, or nature—from the perspective of a woman artist. Known for her work that inserts otherworldly objects in everyday spaces, Ferrer’s unconventional objects and installations have made a bold mark over the past 30 years. Tactile, playful, and often incongruous, her creations invite a humorous yet thought-provoking reflection on our complex relationships with both nature and humanity.

Emerging in the early 1990s, Anne Ferrer’s art immediately set itself apart with sculptural forms that blended animal and floral iconography in entirely new ways. Her hand-sewn meat carcasses, inviting to the touch, and her monumental plastic flowers in fluorescent hues and mechanical articulations, exude a powerful eroticism. These works disturb the eye with their kitsch quality, simultaneously unsettling and joyful. The rich, sensual, violent, and garish textiles Ferrer employs not only offer her the freedom to explore form but also challenge the art world to confront the often-taboo relationship we have with the body.

Ferrer is unmatched in her ability to establish analogies between biological and sexual forms, seamlessly drawing connections between plant and human organs. Her approach is at once playful, perverse, delightful, and natural, blending decoration with profound aesthetic exploration.

Her work has been exhibited in prominent institutions including the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris (1992), the Ho Ham Museum in Seoul (1996), the Lab Gallery in New York City (2008), and the Taubman Museum in Virginia (2012). It is held in the collections of the Telfair Museum in Georgia, the Salomon Collection in France, the Centre Pompidou (2015), and the Musée de la Porte Dorée in Paris. Ferrer has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo and has received two Krasner Pollock Grants (2000 and 2012). She holds an MFA from Oklahoma University (1986), a Master’s degree from Yale University (1988), and a DEA from La Sorbonne (1998). She has also been a resident at the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris. Her work is currently represented by Gallery Berthet Aittouares in Paris.

The Crow Museum of Asian Art is located on the University of Texas at Dallas campus in the Edith and Peter O'Donnell Jr. Athenaeum.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum, 777 Loop Road Southwest, Richardson, United States