Visionnaires. Carte blanche à Prune Nourry

The Petit Palais invites Prune Nourry to take over the whole museum, shedding light in her exhibition 'Visionnaires' on women sculptors who are little known or forgotten by art history.

At the artist's request, three art historians spent a year researching to gather the writings and photographic portraits of eighteen sculptors active between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Among them are 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 has sculpted portraits of these eighteen women as 'visionaries'. In doing so, Prune Nourry makes visible the place of women as creators.

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

From the Gallery of Sculptures to the North Pavilion, the eighteen new portraits created for the Petit Palais revive the memory of sculptresses of the past.

Prune Nourry extends the route by setting around twenty of her earlier works, from the Holy Daughters to the Venuses, in dialogue with the permanent collections.

Like a treasure hunt, visitors set off to discover the eyes of white marble with black pupils set into Prune Nourry's plaster busts, as well as into the bases 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-referenced way of looking at the different periods represented in the museum, from antiquity to the present day.

The artist has chosen plaster as her main material, echoing the museum's collection, of which nearly 70% of the sculptures are 'workshop plasters'. These casts were not intended for museums, yet they have survived the passage of time where the bronze versions were destroyed.