Visionaries. Carte blanche à Prune Nourry
When: 20.10.2026 11:00
Where: 48.866246, 2.313855
Organizer: Admin
At the request of the artist, three art historians conducted research for a year to collect the writings and photographic portraits of eighteen sculpters from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These include Käthe Kollwitz, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Hélène Bertaux, Jane Poupelet, Consuelo de SaintExupéry, Selma Hortense Burke, Daria Gamsaragan and Sarah Bernhardt. Inspired by the artistic quality of their works and the strength of their commitment, Prune Nourry carved the portrait of these eighteen "visionary" women. Prune Nourry thus makes visible the place of women as creators.
The exhibition can be found throughout the collections of the Petit Palais, from the museum's exterior planade to the garden.
On the court, Mothership, a hybrid figure between a pregnant woman and the hull of a rusty metal boat, introduced the exhibition. From the sculpture gallery to the North Pavilion, the eighteen new portraits created for the Petit Palais revive the memory of past sculptresses. Prune Nourry extends the journey by having dialogue with regard to the permanent collections, some 20 of his previous works, from Holy Daughters to Venus.
Like a track game, visitors discover white marble eyes with black pupils embedded in the plaster busts of Prune Nourry as in the bases of the works of the Petit Palais, creating a visual dialogue between the two. These stone eyes, inspired by the polychrome statuary of the Petit Palais, invite to a cross look at the different eras present in the museum, from antiquity to today.
The artist chooses plaster as the main material, echoing the museum's collection, of which almost 70% of the sculptures are workshop plasters. These prints were not intended for museums and yet they went through the time when the bronze versions were destroyed. Prune Nourry also plays with the ladder: its new busts spread from 70 cm to 3.50 m in height, while its earlier works range from 20 cm to 27 m in length, making the exhibition a space where the female body unfolds in all its dimensions.
In the art world, women have long been confined to role models or muses, reduced to bodies scrutinized by a male look. Their disappearance from institutional narratives and sculpture in particular, is not due to an absence of works but to a structural erasure. Distorted by social norms and limited access to training, they had to impose themselves in an environment dominated by male figures. The collection of the Petit Palais bears the trace: ubiquitous as subjects, model bodies, idealized, allegorized, women remain largely absent as creators. Of all the works in the collection, only 4% were made by artists, of whom only 4 were represented. The exhibition is an opportunity to value their works against their portraits.
The sculptors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were thus a pioneer generation. Visionaries, they open the way. Yet, despite the rise of photography, their faces remain difficult to represent. Prune Nourry is part of this living genealogy. It extends the heritage of these sculpters by giving them visibility and affirms, through its practice as well as through its transmission approach, its commitment to the recognition of women in the history of sculpture.
Tags: women artists, exhibition, sculpture
Source: https://www.paris.fr/evenements/visionnaires-carte-blanche-a-prune-nourry-117942
Open in Vibelocate · Markdown