Google Arts & Culture uses AI to reconstruct women sculptors’ lost studios

The Visionaries exhibition in Paris combines archival research, new sculpture and a documentary built around reconstructed workspaces.

A new exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris is using generative AI to help viewers imagine the working spaces of women sculptors whose studios were rarely photographed. Announced by Google Arts & Culture on 21 October, Visionaries centres on artist Prune Nourry’s monumental plaster portraits of 18 historical sculptors.

The accompanying documentary was developed with director Vincent Lorca after a year of archival research involving three art historians. Letters, journals and photographic portraits informed the work. Google Arts & Culture Lab creative technologist Lynn Cherny used generative image tools and a custom Gemini-based process to build three-dimensional scenes and animated camera paths.

The exhibition runs from 20 October 2026 to 30 January 2027. The reconstructed spaces are artistic interpretations informed by archival material, rather than newly discovered photographs of the original studios.

An archive becomes a place to explore

A portrait can show who an artist was, while a studio offers another way into the story: tools, unfinished objects, working space and the relationship between the maker and the surrounding environment. Reconstructing that space gives a film a route through material that may otherwise remain scattered across documents.

The creative task is also unusually specific. The team is not simply generating an attractive historic interior. It is using the available record to tell the story of particular artists and the circumstances in which they worked.

That makes the production sequence important. Research supplies the people, period and surviving details. Visual development turns those details into a spatial proposal. Camera movement then determines what the viewer notices and how the scene connects to the documentary’s argument.

A technique for showing absence

One sequence uses image editing to make women disappear gradually from a historical studio photograph, leaving the men. It makes historical exclusion visible through a deliberate visual effect.

The technique demonstrates a distinct use of AI in documentary production. Instead of hiding the intervention, the film can make the transformation part of its language. The audience sees an argument about absence through an image that changes in front of them.

For museums and cultural publishers, that opens a practical route for explaining incomplete archives. An exhibition can place a surviving document beside a reconstruction, describe the choices made and invite viewers to compare what is recorded with what has been interpreted.

Such a presentation gives historical research an active role throughout production. A newly located letter could change the arrangement of a scene; a detail in a photograph could redirect attention to a tool or piece of work. The resulting image remains an interpretation, but the interpretation can be specific and accountable to the material.

New sculpture meets digital storytelling

Visionaries combines a physical encounter with newly made plaster portraits and a digital encounter with imagined historical spaces. Each medium provides something the other cannot: scale and material presence in the gallery, movement and spatial storytelling on screen.

The project suggests a productive role for generative tools in cultural work when the artistic purpose is clear. They can help a team build a visual bridge between fragmentary records and an audience, while historians and artists continue to make the decisions that give the work meaning.

For visitors, the immediate result is an exhibition about named creators and their working lives. For production teams, it is a concrete example of archives, image generation, three-dimensional scene construction and film editing being used together to tell a historical story.

Sources

- [Recreating the lost studios of women sculptors with Prune Nourry](https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/arts-culture/visionaries-petit-palais-art-basel-paris-prune-nourry/) — Google Arts & Culture · 2026-10-21