There is something unsettling about a face whose name has been forgotten. We may still sense its strength, its weariness, perhaps its determination, yet its story seems to have dissolved between the pages of history books. This is precisely where Prune Nourry chooses to work. With “Visionnaires,” opening at the Petit Palais on October 20, 2026, she does more than display her sculptures: she tries to restore a presence to women who also devoted their lives to making art.
The Women Missing from the Museum
The project begins with a sobering observation: works by women make up only a tiny proportion of the Petit Palais collection. Prune Nourry does not turn that figure into a mere slogan. Working with three art historians, she investigates photographs, letters and archives. Eighteen women sculptors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries come back into focus, including Hélène Bertaux, Käthe Kollwitz, Jane Poupelet and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet. These are not simply names to restore to a list; they represent lives, ambitions and acts of resistance.
What moves me is the decision to make portraits. An artist addressing invisibility might choose to represent emptiness or absence. Nourry does almost the opposite: she gives these women eyes, features, scale and a place in space. She asks us to encounter them as people before treating them as forgotten chapters of art history. That changes everything. We are no longer looking only at a period; we are looking at someone.
Sculpture as Investigation
The busts emerge from records that are sometimes incomplete. An old photograph must be interpreted, a posture understood, and what the image cannot reveal imagined. Sculpture becomes a sensitive kind of investigation, somewhere between historical precision and artistic intuition. Marble eyes, recurring throughout the exhibition, lend the figures an almost living strangeness. They remind us that a portrait is never just a copy: it is an encounter between the subject, the maker and the viewer.
This conversation with the past does not erase Nourry’s own artistic identity. Her work has long explored the body, inheritance, women’s place in society and the ways our lives are shaped by social structures. Her pieces often feel fragile and monumental at once. Here, historical research does not merely illustrate her ideas; it feeds the very material of the sculptures. An archive becomes a gesture, a memory becomes a volume.
A Vessel of Memory Outside the Petit Palais
Before entering the museum, visitors encounter “Mothership,” a monumental hybrid form evoking both a maternal body and the hull of a ship. It opens the exhibition like a signal. Inside, the portraits appear among the collections, galleries and garden. They are not confined to a separate room as though they belonged to a parallel history: they take their place among the works the museum has chosen to preserve. That curatorial choice matters.
I like to imagine a visitor who came for something else entirely and suddenly finds one of these faces. They may discover a sculptor they have never heard of, then begin to see a neighboring work differently. Exhibitions can do that, too: shift, ever so slightly, the way we look at collections we thought we knew.
Restoring Memory Without Pretending to Fix Everything
It would be too easy to believe that eighteen busts could repair decades of neglect. Art history cannot be rewritten in a weekend, and the barriers these women faced do not vanish simply because they finally have an exhibition. But the project does something valuable: it puts faces where we had grown used to seeing blanks. It makes us want to seek out their work, read their stories and understand what has been lost — and what remains to be discovered.
Perhaps this is what I most hope an artist will do: make me look somewhere other than where my eyes usually settle. With “Visionnaires,” Prune Nourry is not speaking only about women from the past. She is asking whom we choose to see today, and whom we might still forget tomorrow. The exhibition is scheduled at the Petit Palais from October 20, 2026, to January 24, 2027.
