Nicola L.—I Am The Last Woman Object

Museion—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano/Bozen is pleased to present a retrospective dedicated to the work of celebrated French artist Nicola L. (b. 1932, Morocco; d. 2018, US). Encompassing sculpture, performance, painting, drawing, collage, and film—all imbued with subversive wit—the exhibition is an unprecedented opportunity to experience the full breadth of her multidisciplinary oeuvre. Nicola L.—I Am The Last Woman Object is the artist’s first museum exhibition in Italy and the most expansive presentation of her work to date. 

From the 1960s onwards, Nicola L. explored softness as a form of resistance. Often perceived in the context of Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, feminism, and design, her practice bridged political activism, cosmology, spirituality, sexuality, and environmentalism. The artist dedicated a large part of her life—mostly spent between Paris, Brussels, Ibiza, and New York—to a kind of softening of domestic and urban space, driven by the desire to connect with other people and ever-changing environments. 

Nicola L.’s large-scale, anthropomorphic sculptures, made to be used as furniture, are the most famous examples of her playful response to the everyday politics of the home interior, particularly regarding the role of women within it. Blurring the boundaries between art and life, the artist has illuminated spaces with lamps shaped like eyes and lips and created an extensive series of ‘loungers’ in soft, pliable forms resembling giant human figures, feet, and hands. Renowned works such as Little TV Woman: “I Am the Last Woman Object” (1969) or the Femmes Commodes (1969–2014)—painted wooden cabinets in the stylized, curvy shape of a female figure with body parts designed to open as drawers—provided a bold critique of traditional gender roles and the objectification of women.

Nicola L.’s leitmotif of penetrating societal boundaries is particularly evident  in the large-format canvases with heads, sleeves, or trouser legs that she developed further over decades, starting in the mid-1960s, and that Pierre Restany inscribed in art history in 1968 as “pénétrables”. These pénétrables, which enable individuals to slip both physically and imaginatively into other bodies and roles—such as those of the sun, moon, and sky—to observe everyday life from a macrocosmic perspective, express Nicola L.’s holistic and non-egocentric view of the world. 

A selection of these extraordinary bodies of works will be shown alongside archival performance documentation which demonstrate the artist’s overarching aim of opening up new performative spaces for collective action. The film The Red Coat For 11 People 70–09 (2009) shows eleven people filling the conjoined pockets of a huge plastic raincoat in various locations. Her performance with the Red Coat (1969) was restaged a dozen times between 1970 and 2016, across various locations in Europe and the USA, and was followed by a suite of other interactive works, in which participants slipped into further coats, capes, rugs, and environments. The largest example of this is her emblematic Fur Room (1970/2020), a reconstruction of which will be presented in the exhibition. Archival video footage and collages connected to the Blue Cape, performed in Havana, Beijing, Venice, Brussels and other places, will be exhibited alongside the rarely seen original of the Black Coat from 1996. All of these immersive, performative works stem from Nicola L.’s utopian idea of generating a shared body, with the “same skin for everybody”—regardless of class, ethnicity, gender or other factors that all too often result in social exclusion. 

In the mid-1970s Nicola L. began making experimental films, some of which she dedicated to figures whose influences are felt in her broader practice, including civil rights activist Abbie Hoffman. As a spiritual daughter of the 1968 political movements, she never lost interest in prominent outsiders, evident in another major series included in the exhibition: her Femmes Fatales (2006). This series of collages on bed sheets memorialize nine famous women whose lives were cut short by tragedy or violence, among them Frida Kahlo, Marilyn Monroe, Billie Holiday, and Ulrike Meinhof. Blending images, text, and color, these portraits reveal the tensions between the women's own passionate convictions, and what history and the media have made of them. 

The retrospective showcases over eighty works from five decades within an exhibition space designed by Studio Manuel Raeder. Following Nicola L.’s playful approach to penetrating institutional structures, the scenography provides a vivid insight into the environments that were the sites of her interventions, from her own domestic space to urban contexts around the world.

As part of Museion’s new research line THE SOFTEST HARD, the exhibition explores art as an urban and social practice of nonviolent resistance. Our present, marked by wars, widespread violence, and threatened democracies, underscores the urgency of Nicola L.’s soft forms of protest against egocentric worldviews and her radical optimism in the continuous search for love and connection.

Curated by Leonie Radine
Exhibition design by Studio Manuel Raeder
Produced by Museion in collaboration with Camden Art Centre, London; Frac Bretagne, Rennes; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna