Ximena Ferrer Pizarro
Medium-term residency
February - July 2025
Ximena Ferrer Pizarro. Lima, 1994
From a collection of real or imagined stories, Ximena paints sensitive and energetic scenes in which her characters look defiantly into the viewer’s eyes. Some cry, others enjoy life without fear, but above all, most fight for the prominence that has historically been denied them. Mixing autofiction, visceral sincerity and the dramatic-humorous language of soap operas, Ximena asks simple and honest questions that denounce, but also humanise, various hardships and current problems. Her painting, figurative but not realistic, questions inequalities, the challenges of interculturality and subjective well-being with a sensibility that is as vulnerable as it is incisive. With an irreverence that does not shy away from the personal, her work seeks to reconcile class institutions and power relations shaped by colonialism, as well as the deep wounds it inscribes on bodies. His scenes transcend the Latin American space and address universal themes such as conservative families, colonial trauma and intersectional feminism. In them he presents imperfect, anthropomorphic characters who tell their own stories: lived or yet to be lived, invented or dreamed. Strange, hard and funny.
Ximena studied painting at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin, where she graduated with distinction, and at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her work has been exhibited in Germany, Spain and France, at venues such as the KINDL Centre for Contemporary Art, the Jorge López Galería in Valencia, the Galerie im Tempelhof Museum and, most recently, the Kunsthalle Mannheim. In 2021 she received the DAAD STIBET scholarship to write her dissertation entitled Telenovelas micropolíticas: Las telenovelas y su rol político en la sociedad, which complemented her final artistic presentation. In 2023 she participated in the Goldrausch Artists’ Project, a programme to professionalise women artists, and in 2024 she received the Elsa Neumann Scholarship for her project Todas las veces que quise ser blanca, as well as the Rainer Wild Foundation Art Promotion Prize. Ximena’s work is currently in the collections of two museums in Berlin: the Berlinische Galerie and the Stadtmuseum Berlin.
