Isabella Ducrot b. 1931

Isabella Ducrot is an artist and writer with a career spanning four decades. Ducrot’s oeuvre is deeply rooted in an extraordinary and enduring interest in fabrics, which remains central to both her pictorial works and writings. Sourced during extensive travels over the course of her life, Ducrot has amassed an exquisite collection of fabric that spans centuries and bears origins from across Asia and Eastern Europe – including Russia, Turkey, China, India, and Tibet. She considers these fabrics as an art form in and of themselves, to which she has dedicated many years of focused study and views as essential to her education. Employing diverse media – including pencil, pastel, ink, and watercolor, which she applies to rare papers – her works compress an array of cultural references, ranging from philosophy to folklore and textile weaving. At both intimate and expansive scales, her work reflects a fascination with repetition, form, and color, informed by the rare textiles in her collection.

Ducrot’s work was the subject of a recent solo exhibition, Profusione at Le Consortium Museum, Dijon, and her installation Big Aura was featured at the Dior Haute Couture SS 2024 runway show at the Musée Rodin, Paris. She has presented solo exhibitions at Petzel, New York; Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Sadie Coles, London; and Standard (Oslo), Oslo. Her works are held in numerous public collections, including the Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; Cranford Collection, London; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome; Le Consortium, Dijon; MAMCO, Geneva; MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Ludovico Corrao, Gibellina; and Munchmuseet, Oslo.

– Petzel Gallery, New York