Prune Nourry is a French contemporary artist recognised for her multimedia projects that address the history of gender selection, notions of the body and healing, and the human experience. While primarily a sculptor, Nourry also works within film, performance, and photography.
Read MoreBetween 2009 and 2015, Nourry produced what she describes as a 'triptych' of projects that question gender selection—often synonymous with female infanticide due to the preference for sons in some cultures—in works presented through sculpture, performance, and film.
Based in India, Holy Daughters (2009) and Holy River (2011) saw the artist combine images of young girls with the cow—a sacred animal in the country—to create hybrid forms. Rendered as life-size sculptures in Holy Daughters, the hybrid creatures appeared in public spaces across India, the responses to which Nourry documented on film. The Holy River project included a six-metre-tall sculpture of the hybrid, shaped by Calcutta artisans using the clay from the sacred Ganges River; after a ceremonial procession through the city as part of the Durga Puja festival, the sculpture was returned to the river in keeping with traditional ritual.
For Terracotta Daughters (2013), the third work in the triptych, Nourry travelled to China and commissioned artisans from Xi'an to create 108 terracotta sculptures based on the famous Terracotta Army of Qin Shi Huang. Nourry's terracotta warriors, however, were schoolgirls—a tribute to the girls who were not selected during China's One Child Policy and the cultural and historical desire to have sons. Terracotta Daughters went on a world tour for two years, after which they were then buried in an undisclosed location in China, where they will be unearthed in 2030.
In 2016, the artist was diagnosed with breast cancer, which led her to reconsider her relationship with artmaking. Previously, she had approached her artworks as if she were an anthropologist, but came to realise that, to an extent, an artist is 'necessarily subjective', as she told Galerie Templon in 2019.
From this period emerged The Amazon (2018), a four-metre sculpture based off the legendary all-woman tribe whose members cut off one of their breasts to better wield their arrows. In Prune Nourry's sculpture, the Amazon's arm is lifted above her head, and the side of her body is covered with red incense sticks, evoking arrows or needles. In 2018, the work was installed in New York as a monument to cancer survivors.
Nourry has made other versions of the Amazon in works such as Amazone Erogène (2019), presented at her solo show Catharsis at Galerie Templon in 2019, which takes the form of wooden arrows launching towards a breast-shaped target. In 2021, the number of arrows increased to 888, when the installation was suspended from the ceiling of Le Bon Marché department store in Paris as part of Nourry's solo exhibition L'amazone érogène. In both works, which evoke an egg and spermatozoa, the artist references the cycles of life and death, procreation and birth, and renewal.
Nourry further explored her artistic creation during her battle with breast cancer in Serendipity, a documentary that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019. It has since been screened at the MoMA DOC Fortnight Documentary Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival.
Pain, sickness, and recovery were also central to Catharsis, which featured sculptural works inspired by votive objects across different cultures. Terracotta pieces in works such as La Femme Miracle make up the human body, referring to the votives offered in hopes of healing inflicted body parts, while the sculpture of the tree-like veins in the body in River Woman (Glass) highlight the advancement of medicine and science (both 2019).
Nourry has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions including Projet Phénix, Galerie Templon, Paris (2021); Catharsis, Galerie Templon, Paris (2019); The Amazon, Standard Plaza Hotel, New York (2018); Holy, Carte Blanche à Prune Nourry, Musée Guimet, Paris (2017); Terracotta Daughters, Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, Mexico City (2014); Holy Daughters, Invisible Dog Art Center, New York (2012); and Holy Daughters, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011).
Selected group exhibitions include Glasstress 2019, 6th edition, Fondazione Berengo Art Space, Venice (2019); Hidden Art, Simon Studer Art, Geneva (2017); Anima, Invisible Do Art Center, New York (2016); Girls, Perrotin, Paris (2014); and At Home, Contemporary Art Center, Malaga (2013).
Prune Nourry's website can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
