Meet the Maker Crafting Exceptional Ceramics Installed in Private Homes, Glamorous Resorts, and the Vatican
Italian artisan Giuseppe Ducrot’s stunning sculptures, statuary, and architectural pieces have appeared in dramatic projects for major designers like Tony Ingrao and William T. Georgis as well as postcard-worthy resorts including Le Sirenuse
Giuseppe Ducrot likes to say he is “two or three different people in the same person.” Looking across his work, it’s easy to see why. The Rome-based artist has built a career creating religious sculpture—ecclesiastical commissions in marble and bronze, several of them in the Vatican—using traditional techniques. But he also crafts ceramic fireplaces, fountains, mirrors, and consoles that look like bits of Baroque architecture gone slightly rogue.
For Ducrot, the two sides of his practice are closely related. “If you train yourself in the classical way, you are free to get started in something more free, more fast,” he says.
Ducrot, who is now 60, was born and raised in a highly creative household in Rome. His mother is the artist and writer Isabella Ducrot (she is represented by Petzel in New York City); his father, Vittorio Ducrot, was a collector with a deep interest in art and also owned a travel agency specializing in India. Ducrot would sometimes accompany him on his journeys. “My parents were an inspiration for me. We used to talk a lot about art and painting, and go to see churches and museums together,” he says, adding, “In my DNA there is also this relationship with the architectural part of art.” Ducrot’s great-grandfather founded Ducrot Palermo, a major Sicilian furniture company known for its Liberty-style decorative arts in the early 20th century.
Ducrot first exhibited drawings as a teenager, but sculpture arrived later. He trained by copying Roman busts, learning the discipline of classical form from a master before moving into church commissions and public monuments. For years, that was his focus until he pivoted into ceramics, for practical reasons. “It is faster and cheaper compared to marble and bronze,” he admits. But clay, specifically hand building with slabs, gave him a different kind of freedom. “The ceramic gives you the possibility to be like an architect. You can invent facades and things that look like a building.”
That architectural connection is one reason Ducrot’s pieces stand out in an increasingly crowded ceramics landscape. He often begins with a quick drawing, followed by a small clay model before producing the finished work that ideally preserves the energy of the original illustration. “The [goal] is to give an idea of a fast sketch but three-dimensional,” he says. Smaller pieces are made in his Rome studio, while larger fountains and architectural elements are produced in Faenza, Italy’s historic ceramics capital, where larger kilns can accommodate monumental pieces.
Over the past decade, Ducrot’s ceramics—available through Twenty First Gallery— have attracted a growing roster of hospitality and residential clients. He has conceived fountains for Le Sirenuse in Positano and Le Sirenuse Mare, the hotel’s beach club on the Amalfi Coast, and designed façade elements for Vermelho, Christian Louboutin’s hotel in Melides, Portugal. Interior designers including Georgis & Mirgorodsky, Jessica Schuster, and Tony Ingrao have also solicited works for private residences.
Ducrot sees all of his inventions, whether destined for a church, a luxury hotel, or a presonal home, as part of the same creative language. Still, he doesn’t see ceramics as a break from the rest of his practice. “Everything is language,” he says. “Poetry is language. Cinema is language. Art is language. Just with different media.”