“I have never been so happy.”
We met Isabella Ducrot in her studio, surrounded by fragile papers, pigments, and folded textiles. “When you go into your studio and you start painting, what happens inside of you?” “Happiness, happiness, happiness. I amuse myself madly.”
Ducrot paints in an explorative way. “I didn’t know what was going to happen. It is always a surprise. Sometimes the simplest things, a round shape… Beauty comes. But I didn’t call her. I didn’t know her name.”
Her practice moves between painting and textile, language and structure. She speaks of weaving as a metaphor for thought itself: two threads crossing, and then a third presence, “something between,” an empty space that holds meaning. “Paper has not the third element. Textile has it. There is always what is between the two.”
Named Antonia but called Isabella, she describes her identity as fluid, uncertain, continually becoming. “I am confused … But it is typical of my life. I have always done something without being sure what I was doing.” The uncertainty is not fear but freedom. “Now I am fully artist. I stay here and work. I have never been so free in my life.”
Ducrot’s feminism, too, is rooted in material experience. She believes women must invent another language, one grounded not in looking but in touching, in the knowledge of the body. “ We should not imitate. We must change the way of telling things.”
Time, for her, is the rarest fabric. “It is a lost time. I don’t want to lose time. Time is so precious. I want to amuse myself every moment.”
Isabella Ducrot (b. 1931, Naples) is an artist and writer whose four-decade career is rooted in a sustained engagement with textiles as both material and metaphor. Working with pencil, pastel, ink, and watercolor on delicate papers, Ducrot compresses cultural references spanning philosophy, folklore, and weaving traditions, exploring repetition, form, and color at both intimate and monumental scales. 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.
Recent exhibitions include Profusione at Le Consortium, Dijon; presentations at Petzel, New York; Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Sadie Coles, London; and Incongruous (2025), Kōseiin Temple, Kyoto, Japan.
Isabella Ducrot was interviewed by Astrid Agnes Hald in her studio in Rome in January 2026.
Camera: Jarl Therkelsen Kaldan
Edited by: Astrid Agnes Hald
Produced by: Astrid Agnes Hald
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026
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