Visionnaires. Carte blanche à Prune Nourry

The Petit Palais invites Prune Nourry to take over the entire museum to highlight, in her exhibition "Visionnaires", female sculptors little known or forgotten by art history.

At the artist's request, three art historians conducted research for a year to gather the writings and photographic portraits of eighteen female sculptors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Among them are Käthe Kollwitz, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Hélène Bertaux, Jane Poupelet, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Selma Hortense Burke, Daria Gamsaragan, and Sarah Bernhardt.

Inspired by the artistic quality of their works and the strength of their commitment, Prune Nourry sculpted the portraits of these eighteen "visionary" women. Prune Nourry thus makes visible the place of women as creators.

The exhibition unfolds throughout the Petit Palais collections, from the museum's outdoor esplanade to the garden. On the forecourt, Mothership, a hybrid figure between a pregnant woman and the hull of a rusted metal boat, introduces the exhibition.

From the sculpture gallery to the North Pavilion, the eighteen new portraits created for the Petit Palais revive the memory of past female sculptors.

Prune Nourry extends the journey by creating a dialogue with the permanent collections, featuring about twenty of her previous works, from Holy Daughters to Vénus.

Like a treasure hunt, visitors discover white marble eyes with black pupils embedded in Prune Nourry's plaster busts as well as in the pedestals of the Petit Palais's works, creating a visual dialogue between the two.

These stone eyes, inspired by the polychrome statuary of the Petit Palais, invite a cross-cutting view of the different eras present in the museum, from antiquity to the present day.

The artist chooses plaster as the main material, echoing the museum's collection, where nearly 70% of the sculptures are "studio plasters. " These casts were not intended for museums, yet they have endured through time where bronze versions were destroyed.

Prune Nourry also plays with scale: her new busts