Prune Nourry’s carte blanche exhibition at the Petit Palais features 18 plaster busts with marble eyes portraying women sculptors whose work and biographies were often overlooked following their lifetimes, according to museum officials. The installation, which runs through January 24, 2027, places the portraits amid the permanent collection and in the gardens, where some of the works stand as high as 3.5 meters. A Google blog post titled Recreating the lost studios of women sculptors with Prune Nourry details how the project employs digital tools to reconstruct the artists’ workspaces as part of an immersive experience available through the Bloomberg Connects app.
The Petit Palais collection contains only about 4 percent of works by women artists, with just four female sculptors represented, a disparity that prompted the exhibition, the museum reported. Nourry collaborated with three art historians from the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions over a year to review around 60 candidates drawn from those who had worked or exhibited in Paris. The selected group includes Camille Claudel, Sarah Bernhardt, Käthe Kollwitz, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Hélène Bertaux and Jane Poupelet, alongside representations for unnamed students and artists whose identities remain unrecovered.
Nourry told ELLE magazine that each portrait required at least two usable photographs, often limited to frontal views or taken years apart, to guide the sculpting process conducted in a temporary studio at the Saint-Denis Pleyel station. The exhibition also incorporates audio elements in which Marion Cotillard reads the sculptors’ writings in French while Janelle Monáe and Laura Dern provide the English version, according to exhibition materials. Additional works by Nourry from her earlier series appear alongside the new portraits to create dialogue across time.
Art historians note that women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries faced systemic barriers including restricted access to formal training, limited exhibition opportunities and frequent attribution of their output to male mentors or spouses, a PwC review of cultural sector equity found. Public collections worldwide continue to reflect those imbalances, with multiple surveys by the National Museum of Women in the Arts placing female representation in permanent displays below 10 percent in many European institutions. The research for Visionaries drew on letters, journals and archival images to reconstruct both the artists’ likenesses and elements of their creative environments.
The project extends Nourry’s longstanding focus on female representation, building on her earlier Venus series that addressed violence against women through prehistoric-inspired forms, according to a Franceinfo report. Some busts take negative or collective forms to acknowledge those whose names were lost, the artist explained in an interview with Numéro magazine. Organizers said the exhibition aims to integrate these recreated presences into the museum’s daily visitor flow rather than isolate them in a separate gallery.
A companion digital component developed with Google Arts & Culture allows users to explore reconstructed studio spaces that no longer exist, drawing on historical records to visualize tools, materials and working conditions, the blog post stated. The initiative aligns with broader efforts by the Google Cultural Institute to surface overlooked narratives, similar to its 2023 Women in Culture collection that highlighted figures across arts, science and activism. Exhibition curators indicated that the combination of physical sculpture and digital reconstruction offers multiple entry points for audiences to engage with the recovered histories.
