ART CITIES: London-Isabella Ducrot

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, that is central to both her pictorial works and writings. Sourced during extensive travels over the course of her life, Ducrot has amassed an exquisite collection that spans centuries and bear 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 herself to many years of focussed study and views essential to her education.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sadie Coles HQ Archive

At Isabella Ducrot’s solo exhibition “Remembering flowers”, the artist demonstrates her unwavering ability to be continually inventive while delving into familiar motifs, providing an intimate insight into her artmaking practice. The exhibition echoes Ducrot’s lived environment, where floral arrangements, figurative paintings, found textiles, collected ceramics, books and artworks of Ducrot’s own creation collide. As both an artist and writer, Ducrot boldly defies pre-established genres, freely combining visual signifiers with untethered excerpts of raw and translated language to craft an exhibition that resonates with the cadence of linguistic expression. In this ambitious new body of work on textile, each titled “Surprise”, Ducrot experiments with known motifs in a complex layering of sewn, sketched and painted materials with block printed paper. Central to Ducrot’s practice is the pursuit of truth, extracts of written words are treated as precious fragments of fabric and stitched together to weave a narrative. Each unique composition reveals inner life with a decorative border – a window or door to an interior world – employed as an arched framing device reminiscent of Persian tapestries. Handwritten elements pay homage to Ducrot’s late husband, whose philosophical ruminations detail their collection of Indian miniatures. Diary entries are scanned, printed and centred, other clippings become textured vases and Ducrot’s own exclamations are enlarged to be utilised as signifiers, interrupting the scenes of domesticity. Text and fabric, as vehicles for meaning in their own right, are combined, exemplifying how Ducrot fearlessly imbues her art with sentiment. Elsewhere in her ongoing “Pots” series, Ducrot positions the vase of flowers as her protagonist with newfound vigour in an unrestrained and animated style that drifts from her earlier tender and refined approach. These mixed media collages now consume their environment, exuberantly extending to the perimeters of their frame, expansive and full, in bloom, as if each is an individual printed textile. Nimbly sketched floral outlines are filled with cutouts and pigments of blues and florescent yellows, furthering their development from the quieter hues of their solitary predecessors. Yet familiar elements are retained, the quadrangles of checkered cloth emerge from the bottom of the textile ‘page’, offsetting the welcomed explosion of colour, detail and textural layers above. Ducrot cites the initial inspiration behind her enduring fascination with the grid pattern as Simone Martini’s “The Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus” (1333) as she resonates with how ‘The perpendicular lines and right-angles interfere with the sinuousness of the curved lines that dominate the painting, creating a clash, a challenge to the formal balance of the whole.’ This challenge of the formal balance extends to Ducrot’s own inclusion of the simple cloth in her energetic still life imaginings, and further into the wider themes of the exhibition. The artist relentlessly reinvents and evolves her artmaking, inviting those familiar with her work to continually question and rediscover, to look again for new meaning.

Photo left: Isabella Ducrot, Surprise XVIII, 2024, pigments, paper, collage, fabrics and China ink on textile, 83 x 65 cm / 32 ⅝ x 25 ⅝ in, © Isabella Ducrot, courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Georgio Benni. Photo Right: Isabella Ducrot, Surprise XVII, 2024, pigments, paper, collage, fabrics and China ink on textile, 133 x 66 cm / 52 ⅜ x 26 in, © Isabella Ducrot, courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Georgio Benni

Info: Sadie Coles HQ, 8 Bury Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 28/6-17/8/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.sadiecoles.com/