From the 5th July to the 14th September, the State Apartments of the Prince’s Palace of Monaco are playing host to a deeply personal exhibition, ‘Grace #1’, curated by Natalia Mlodzikowska, Head of Exhibitions for the Palace Collections, and guest artistic curator Marie-Eve Mestre.

Far from the clichés and rigid portrayals that often surround Princess Grace, the woman born Grace Patricia Kelly is presented here with warmth and inner strength. “What do you do when you go to someone’s home? You walk around, you sit, you smell, you touch… it is that feeling that I really want people to feel with this exhibition,” Mlodzikowska told Monaco Life’s Cassandra Tanti.

A sensory space rich with emotion and memory

Spanning 90 square metres across three rooms, the scenography has been conceived as a soft, protective sanctuary. Velvet curtains, gentle lighting, muted carpets, and a delicate rose fragrance accompany the ambient birdsong, creating a serene and poetic atmosphere.

The exhibition explores four themes reflecting different facets of the Princess: the young woman in her natural element, the elegant and discreet figure of her everyday life, the devoted mother, and the private artist behind the lens.

Each space is adorned with never-before-seen portraits and deeply personal items, including sunglasses, gloves, hats, and the iconic Hermès Kelly bag. One striking feature is a wallpaper created from a contact sheet found in the archives, delicately restored and reimagined as part of the exhibition’s design.

The woman behind the title

For Mlodzikowska, the process of curating ‘Grace #1’ brought about a profound transformation in her understanding of the Princess. “I read the biography by Jean des Cars, who was a close friend of Princess Grace, and I found it incredible,” she said. “You see how she really was – very strong, very independent, but she was also a humanist… She would say that every woman can be the woman she wants to be. And she was the woman she wanted to be, and this is something I admire greatly.”

This desire to present Princess Grace beyond her public image was central to the exhibition’s narrative. “Everyone always sees her only as a princess – of course very beautiful, but somewhat cold, in a perfect way. But she was joyful in her private life. She loved her family, her children, her dog. She loved nature, she was very involved in art and culture, and many social organisations. For me, she was incredible.”

Curating with vision and heart

The exhibition took four months to assemble, with one-and-a-half months spent selecting the images alone. “It was a nightmare to condense all the photographs,” Mlodzikowska admitted. “There are so many beautiful pictures of her. But when I read that biography, I already started to have images in my mind of what I wanted.”

The result is a rich and balanced collection of photographs and personal effects that speaks to the soul of the Princess. “She had this grace to her, and she was very emotional, but she was also incredibly strong,” said Mlodzikowska, recalling how a young Grace Kelly repaid her father in full for funding her acting studies in New York City — a remarkable act of independence for a woman in the 1930s.

Among her favourites, the curator singled out one of Grace in the water, taken by photographer Howell Conant during a holiday in Jamaica, which featured on the cover of weekly magazine Colliers. “There is this sense that eyes reflect the soul, and for me, this is who she really was.”

That same quiet strength is evident in the photographs displayed in the first room, all taken by the same gifted American photographer and close friend of Grace.

A striking mural of the Princess lounging on a couch fills one wall, while a series of close-ups nearby reveal a woman who is both seductive and self-possessed — at ease with her femininity and empowered by her inner resolve.

‘Grace #1’ is not a historical retrospective, but a lyrical, immersive experience – a chance to encounter Princess Grace in all her sensitivity, strength, and complexity, and perhaps to understand, for the first time, the woman behind the icon.

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Main photo credit: Cassandra Tanti, Monaco Life