Visited Lands

Petzel is pleased to present an exhibition of new collage-based works by Rome-based artist Isabella Ducrot, opening Thursday, June 5, 2025. The show marks Ducrot’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view through July 18, 2025, at 520 West 25th Street. Ducrot builds on her floral “Profusion” series, while debuting a new suite of works, titled “The Visited Land,” which use meteorite pigments for the first time to develop a new relationship to the artist’s materials and the natural world.

Ducrot’s “Visited Lands” began as an outgrowth of her “Bella Terra” works: bucolic, sweeping landscapes that exalt the simplicity and purity of the earth’s bountiful beauty. However, these new “Visited Lands” make use of textures and hues from beyond this planet, creating a cosmic connection with the celestial realms while raising questions about the status of the earth’s resources and precarious ecologies.

Using Japanese Gampi paper to ground her creations, Ducrot’s works are deceptively fragile looking, as she states: “There is a quarrel between the material with which I am working and the largeness—they are very big sheets and they look frail, but they are not.” Here, her use of Gampi paper—which has been used to preserve manuscripts and antiquarian texts—inhabits core tensions about environmental demise and human custodianship. Just as the paper is deceptive in its airy appearance, Ducrot suggests its veiled durability offers a semblance of promise for the perseverance of ecological balance.

In her “Profusion” series, Ducrot has built on the tradition of the still life, crafting exuberant representations of flowers which cascade from their pastel pots. Ducrot’s works both embody the limitless bounty of natural beauty and exude the manifold associations inherent to the symbology of flowers, bound in ancient and habitual rituals of giving, honoring, and adorning. The works are characterized by Ducrot’s vivacious palette, enacted in powdery pigments and delicate lines of ink, depicting geometric entanglements of stems, leaves, and petals. Her “Profusions” overflow with abundance, reaching for exaggerated proportions beyond the plane.

While Ducrot’s “Profusion” works center on unfurling desire—gestures of acknowledgment, admiration, or devotion—“The Visited Lands” offer a meditation on human responsibility toward each other and our planet. Centering her material, sourced from various global regions and among the stars, Ducrot places the qualities of the cosmos at forefront, recognizing the interconnectedness of all living things. As Ducrot states, “We are understanding our land is frail now, and in a way, we have arrived to a meeting with the fragility of our ecological situation and this material—yet perhaps the land is not so fragile as we think.”

About Isabella Ducrot

Isabella Ducrot (b. 1931, Naples, Italy) 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 of fabric 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 focused study and views 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, titled Big Aura was featured at the Dior Haute Couture SS 2024 runway show at the Musee Rodin, Paris. Ducrot has presented solo exhibitions at Petzel, New York, Gisela Capitain, Cologne, Sadie Coles, London and Standard (Oslo), Oslo. Ducrot lives and works in Rome.