Sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s muse was about birth, not beauty, Pace’s London show argues

Stand in front of one of Constantin Brancusi’s muses and the first thing you notice is what has gone. The ear, the line of the jaw, the fall of the hair: one by one they are polished away until a woman’s head is little more than an egg resting on its side. The usual account calls that abstraction. A new exhibition in London makes an older, stranger case: that the egg was the point all along, and that Brancusi was sculpting the idea of origin itself.

The show is Matrix Muse, Pace’s first solo presentation of the sculptor since the gallery took on worldwide representation of his estate earlier this year, staged to mark a century and a half since his birth. Its curator, Jérôme Neutres, former president of the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, sets four major sculptures beside drawings and archival material that have never been exhibited. The title does real work. In Late Latin, matrix meant womb as well as source and origin, from māter, mother; centuries later it came to mean a mould in which something is cast. It is a sculptor’s word as much as a mother’s.

Black-and-white photograph of Constantin Brancusi seated with arms crossed in his Paris studio, Endless Column sculptures behind him — Brancusi in his studio at 11 Impasse Ronsin, Paris, c. 1932–1934. Collection Centre Pompidou © Succession Brancusi – All rights reserved (Adagp) 2026. Image courtesy Pace Gallery

The thread starts with children. Portraits of infants and newborns were “an important part of his creative output around 1906–10,” curator Ariane Coulondre writes in the exhibition’s texts, and then “the child’s portrait turns into an egg or a cell, a metaphor at once for birth and the renewal of forms.” Pace’s selection holds that turn in a single bronze, Le premier cri (The First Cry, 1917).

From there the women’s heads take over. By 1910 recognisable features had given way to the simplified ovoid of the muse, which he kept refining for the rest of his career; he made some fifteen Sleeping Muses from 1909 onwards, drawing on the African and Cycladic fertility figures he admired. Two muses anchor the London show: La muse endormie I (Sleeping Muse I, 1912), a plaster cast, and Une Muse (A Muse, 1918), an upright bronze on a stone base. Brancusi began with direct carving, and the plaster and the bronze cast from it were, in the words of sculpture specialist Chantal Quirot, “further steps toward a more accomplished form.”

The genuine discovery is on paper. Ink and gouache drawings from 1917 to 1925 appear here for the first time, from an artist who made fewer than three hundred in his life, many of them portraits of female friends. They are not studies, curator Marielle Tabart argues: “the drawings are an accompaniment to the sculptures rather than preparatory sketches.” Notes, photographs and objects from his archive, also never shown before, fill in the man behind the polish. Neutres calls the “genetrix muse” the heart of Brancusi’s visual innovation, “a ‘matrix’ that inspires much of modern and contemporary art history through today.”

Matrix Muse runs at Pace’s Hanover Square gallery in London from November 25, 2026, to January 30, 2027. It overlaps with Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, on view through February 27, 2027.

Two cities, one sculptor, and the same proposition seen from both ends: the studio where the forms were made, and the egg they kept returning to.

Tags: pace gallery, art exhibitions, Constantin Brancusi, Jérôme Neutres, Museum of Modern Art, sculptures