The Petit Palais in Paris has handed its entire building to French artist Prune Nourry for a show that puts forgotten women sculptors at the centre of the story. Titled Visionnaires, the exhibition opened on 20 October 2026 and runs until 24 January 2027, with free entry. It is presented as a carte blanche, meaning Nourry was given unusual freedom to shape the whole museum experience rather than a single gallery.

At the heart of the display are 18 newly made plaster portraits of women who worked as sculptors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but rarely received the recognition of their male contemporaries. The subjects include German printmaker and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz, American sculptor Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, French artists Hélène Bertaux and Jane Poupelet, and writer and sculptor Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, alongside Selma Hortense Burke, Daria Gamsaragan and Sarah Bernhardt. The portraits grew out of a year of research carried out with three art historians.

Nourry's own earlier work is woven into the show as well. Around twenty pieces drawn from her Holy Daughters and Venus series appear alongside the new portraits, and a large work titled Mothership stands in the museum forecourt. The combination sets her long-running interest in the female body and in women's creative lives against the historical figures she is now honouring, turning the exhibition into both a tribute and a continuation of her own practice.

The project also reaches beyond the museum walls. Google Arts and Culture has produced a documentary that recreates the sculptors' studios with the help of artificial intelligence, giving visitors a way to picture the working conditions these women faced. By pairing new sculpture, archival research and a digital companion piece, Visionnaires argues that the absence of these artists from the canon was a matter of neglect rather than talent, and invites a public audience to meet them for the first time.