Isabella Ducrot
For this year’s installment of the ADAA Art Show, Petzel is pleased to present a solo booth of new collage works by Isabella Ducrot, including the debut of a new series, titled “Suprise,” from the Rome-based artist. Beginning to make art in her fifties, Ducrot, who turned ninety-three in June, has only achieved international recognition for her works on paper in the last half decade. This past summer, the Consortium Museum in Dijon hosted Ducrot’s first international solo museum exhibition, titled Profusione. Over the past four decades, Ducrot has developed a singular practice grounded in a profound respect for woven fabrics and paper. Having cultivated an expansive collection of rare textiles–some spanning centuries in age and bearing global origins, from Turkey to Tibet—Ducrot applies rich pigments atop their surfaces, often by hand, in patterned motifs and pastel colors.
Surprise
Ducrot presents five works from her new “Suprise” series, marking a new chapter for the artist, who has developed a distinct approach to make these works. Using written pages and ephemera, penned by others, Ducrot sews these writings directly into the collage. Long estranged to time, found in the artist’s drawers and cabinets, Ducrot revitalizes these pages by centering the beauty of their calligraphy, beyond the contents of the material itself.
“In Ducrot’s hands, these texts were transformed from one thing into another, just like the textiles that she once gathered from far-off places.”
—Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker
Tendernesses & Bella Terra
This presentation includes works from both her “Tendernesses” and “Bella Terra” series, highlighting Ducrot’s interest in “the possibility of touch” and a lyrical sensitivity to the natural world, respectively. Ducrot’s former series captures couples entangled in crumbled embraces, framed by luminous halos, slivered moons, and conjoined atop patterned grids. Across her “Bella Terra” works, Ducrot’s delicate lines and vibrant flushes of color reveal the majesties of the natural world to the viewer, conjuring themes of myth, travel, and cosmic awe.
“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