ARTIST BIO

Nelson Ferreira is a master painter and draughtsman trained in the rigorous 15th-century and 19th-century Academic traditions. He specialises in silverpoint, oil glazing, and the sight-size method, and is widely regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of these historic techniques today.

He has been invited twice as visiting lecturer at the National Portrait Gallery (London) to teach Renaissance silverpoint drawing during The Encounter: Drawings by Holbein, Leonardo and Dürer exhibition. He has also taught at the Saatchi Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and regularly instructs senior artists at Walt Disney Animation Studios. As a visiting professor, he lectures at fine-art faculties worldwide, including recent appointments in Indonesia at Universitas Negeri Jakarta, Universitas Negeri Malang, and the American Corner programme at Universitas Muhammadiyah Malang.

Between 2023 and 2025 Ferreira held critically acclaimed solo exhibitions in Portugal, Italy, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, collectively attracting more than 300,000 visitors. His monumental PlatiGleam painting, acquired for the permanent collection of the 14th century UNESCO-listed Batalha Monastery in Portugal, has now been viewed by over one million people.

In summer 2025 he made history as the first artist ever granted official permission to exhibit inside the 1,200-year-old Borobudur Temple — the world’s largest Buddhist temple and Indonesia’s most visited UNESCO World Heritage site. That same year he completed the first fully documented artistic residency at Angkor Wat, Cambodia. Works from these landmark projects are now on long-term display in the Borobudur Museum.
 

@nelson.ferreira.visual.artist
www.nelson-ferreira.com
www.bargue.org