Serena Alma Ferrario was born in 1986 in Crema near Milan. From 2010 to 2017 she studied at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts with Wolfgang Ellenrieder, Hartmut Neumann, Ciprian Muresan and Isa Melsheimer. In 2016 she received her diploma with honors and in 2017 she was named a master student.
Ferrario was a scholarship recipient of the German National Academic Foundation and in 2017 was awarded one of the three master student prizes of the Stiftung Braunschweigischer Kulturbesitz and the Max-Ernst-Stipendium of the city of Brühl. In 2018, Serena Ferrario received the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship and was nominated for the Columbus Förderpreis für aktuelle Kunst. At the jury meeting on May 3, 2021, Serena Ferrario was unanimously selected as the winner of the 7th Horst Janssen Graphic Prize.
Serena Ferrario is a precise observer of her surroundings. From initial sketches, she develops series that are subsequently often spun into a web of references. Figures emerge and wander from one drawing to the next. Ferrario refrains almost exclusively from using color. Instead, she deliberately restricts herself to black and white and the gray shades in between. The dimensions of drawing and lines are examined just as sensitively as the effect of the resulting figures and sceneries. The drawings often leave their traditional framework and spread out into space, taking it over and becoming installative works in which silkscreen prints, photocopies or deep-drawn plastic elements are integrated.
Beside her drawings, Ferrario has been creating installative and film works for some time. Based on self-filmed and found material, newspaper clippings, but also original drawings, these films develop into surreal-looking stories in which anything seems possible.
For the past three years, Ferrario's own migration and family history has repeatedly been at the center of the content of her works. Serena Ferrario negotiates the inner conflict arising from the interculturality in her family (Romanian mother and Italian father) in relation to the affiliation of origin within her artistic work. She sees herself as a Third Culture Adult Kid, who tries to define this self-discovered third culture in free art and who feels free and in it.
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