Isabella Ducrot

Isabella Ducrot (b. 1931, Naples, Italy)

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.

Isabella Ducrot lives and works in Rome.

“You can make a drawing of two people in love, but the tenderness doesn’t always come out. I’m trying to make tenderness come out, tenderness and the possibility of touch.”

—Isabella Ducrot

Career Highlights

Isabella Ducrot, Italian Pavilion of the 1993 Venice Biennale

1931 Born in Naples. Ducrot has been living and working in Rome for many years.

In her extensive travels she developed a particular interest in fabrics from countries east of Europe and began studying the many differences in the textile traditions of China, India, Turkey and Central Asia. Over the years she has amassed a collection of rare fabrics of historical interest, and has long used textiles in her own work.

1989 Ducrot creates 12 paintings made up of panels that incorporated fragments of an Andean fabric dating back one thousand years. She subsequently spent two years creating a rich series of tapestries around a recurring motif in Ottoman culture, the cintamani pattern.

1990 Begins using paper to create a series of large drawings and monotypes in black and white.

1993 Ducrot presents a large tapestry at the 1993 Venice Biennale that is today part of the collection of the Contemporary Art Museum of Gibellina, Sicily.

Isabella Ducrot, L’Arte non è cosa nostra at the Italian Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale

2002 Ducrot creates a series of paper tapestries entitled “Memorie di una terra”, from memories of a trip to Afghanistan, which were exhibited at the Milan State Archives. A large collage of fabric, paper and paint was exhibited and acquired by the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome, while a large pastel on silk is part of the collection of Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art.