Marta Ignerska

Marta Ignerska was born in 1978 in Poland. She studied multimedia art and book design from 2000 to 2005 at the Academy of the Visual Arts in Warsaw and graduated with a distinction. Following that she worked from 2006 to 2007 as a graphic designer at the Zachęta National Art Gallery in Warsaw. From 2007 to 2008 she was artistic director at the agency Koledzy Stategia & Kreacja. Since 2009 she has been working as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator for books.

Ignerska is well known for the enormous diversity, as well as her expressive style and her joy in playing with unusual forms. Her best-known illustrated work to date, »Wszystko Gra« (2011; tr. All tuned up) tells a poetic story about the instruments in an orchestra and their specific character traits. Ignerska’s illustrations for this story are glaringly colourful and embedded within a strongly expressive visual dramaturgy. Ignerska shows impressively with her sensually expressive pictures that you cannot only hear music, but see it as well. Ignerska’s artistic vision can also be clearly seen in books like »Alfabet« (2009; tr: Alphabet), an artfully designed story about the letters of the alphabet. Ignerska’s illustrations stand out due to their broad colour spectrum and their mostly high colour saturation. She has the courage to tell stories in an unconventional manner using unusual forms and graphic structures which are not immediately understandable at first glance, but first have to be decoded.

Ignerska is regarded to one of the most important graphic designers and illustrators of her generation. She has received many awards for her illustrative work, among these the European Design Award, the Bologna Ragazzi Award twice and the Polish IBBY Prize for the Book of the Year several times. Ignerka’s illustrations are not only to be found in books, but also in various Polish daily newspapers and magazines. Her artistic work has been shown in exhibitions in Berlin, Munich, Milan and Paris. Ignerska lives in Warsaw.