Rediscovering the Visionaries

At the Petit Palais in Paris, Visionaries gives Prune Nourry an unusual assignment: not simply to present a new body of work, but to bring back into view a constellation of women sculptors largely forgotten by art history. The French artist transforms the museum into a space where past and present meet, creating an exhibition that combines historical research with contemporary artistic practice. Over the course of a year, three art historians reconstructed the lives of eighteen women sculptors active between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, gathering photographs, writings and archival documents. From this research, Prune Nourry created eighteen new sculptural portraits dedicated to figures such as Käthe Kollwitz, Hélène Bertaux, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Jane Poupelet, Selma Burke and even Sarah Bernhardt, remembered here not as an actress but for her work as a sculptor. Rather than celebrating forgotten names, the exhibition seeks to restore a face and a presence to artists who helped pave the way for later generations yet remained largely absent from the official narrative of art history. The project extends well beyond the exhibition galleries. Nourry's new works are installed among the Petit Palais' permanent collection, in its gardens and on the museum's forecourt, where visitors are welcomed by Mothership, a hybrid figure suspended between the body of a pregnant woman and the rusted hull of a ship. Around twenty earlier works from the artist's Holy Daughters and Venus series are also integrated into the display, creating a dialogue between her own practice and that of the sculptors who preceded her. One of the exhibition's most distinctive features is a visual treasure hunt. Small white marble eyes with black pupils are embedded both in Nourry's plaster busts and in the pedestals of selected historical sculptures throughout the museum. Visitors are invited to discover them as they move through the galleries, following a thread that connects works from different centuries. The choice of plaster is equally significant: almost seventy percent of the Petit Palais' sculpture collection consists of studio plaster casts, many of which survived while their bronze counterparts have disappeared. The exhibition also begins with a striking fact about the museum's own collection. Women are everywhere as subjects, allegorical figures or models, yet they are largely absent as creators: only four percent of the works are by women, and just four women sculptors are represented in the permanent collection. Visionaries takes this imbalance as its starting point, asking how artistic memory is constructed and why certain stories have remained outside the frame for so long.