The Petit Palais has handed its galleries, forecourt, and gardens to Prune Nourry for "Visionaries," a carte-blanche commission timed to Paris Art Week 2026. At its center stand eighteen new plaster portraits, ranging from about two to eleven feet tall, each depicting a woman sculptor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose contribution was sidelined by official art history. The project grew out of a year of research in which three art historians assembled the writings and photographic portraits of these figures, including Käthe Kollwitz, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Hélène Bertaux, Jane Poupelet, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, Selma Hortense Burke, Daria Gamsaragan, and Sarah Bernhardt.

Nourry stages the new busts in direct conversation with the museum's own holdings, a fitting pairing: nearly seventy percent of the Petit Palais sculpture collection consists of studio plasters, working casts never intended for display that nonetheless outlived many finished bronzes. The show opens on the forecourt with "Mothership," a suspended hybrid of a pregnant woman and a rusted ship's hull, while the sculpture gallery of the North Pavilion gathers the eighteen portraits together. Some twenty earlier pieces from the artist's "Holy Daughters" and "Venus" series, spanning eight inches to ninety feet, run through the display, joined by a recurring signature: white marble eyes with black pupils set into Nourry's busts and into the pedestals of the museum's own works, forcing a visual comparison across centuries.

The commission extends themes Nourry has pursued for over a decade. Her "Terracotta Daughters" (2012–2030), a response to sex selection in China, comprises 108 life-size clay figures modeled on eight orphan girls; after touring internationally, the sculptures were buried in 2015 at an undisclosed Chinese site to await excavation in 2030. A breast cancer diagnosis at thirty-one in 2016 turned her practice inward, documented in her 2018 film "Serendipity." Working with ethnologists, geneticists, and artisans, she has consistently used sculpture to recover women's fates that history mislaid, and "Visionaries" makes that recovery literal, giving eighteen forgotten sculptors monumental physical presence.