The Brooklyn Rail

A sense of transformation, rebellion, hope, and play suffuses the multifarious art of Nicola L. (b. 1932, Morocco; d. 2018, US) in ways that make it ever more relevant in our present times. The exhibition invites new lines of inquiry into her five-decade-long experimentation with painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, performance, and film. Gathering over eighty works spanning from the 1960s to the 2010s, it marks the first in-depth presentation of the artist’s work in Italy, and, as part of a collaboration with other institutions, where slightly different incarnations of the retrospective took place in 2024 and 2025—London’s Camden Art Centre, Rennes’s Frac Bretagne, and Vienna’s Kunsthalle Wien—it provides a long-overdue reconsideration of the full breath of L.’s oeuvre in Europe.

Walking through I Am the Last Woman Object, one finds oneself immersed in a journey into her imaginative universe that, unfolding beyond chronology, interweaves her manifold output highlighting the fluidity of her investigation of the body, sexuality, and spirituality across time, as well as her enduring engagement with feminist and political concerns.

What emerges is the artist’s distinctive ability to dwell “at the threshold,” exploring the transitional zones that open up “in between.” With a penchant for breaking down boundaries, her work investigates the territory in between the domestic and the public, the human and the natural worlds, the sensual and the spiritual, the personal and the political.

A nomadic impulse imbues both her life and her work, ultimately tying them together. Born in Morocco to French parents, the daughter of an officer in the French army who moved often between duty stations during the Second World War, Nicola L. became accustomed to a state of continuous shift. She grew up in North Africa, France, and, for a brief period of time, in Germany. By the 1970s, she lived between Paris, Ibiza, and Brussels, and in 1979 she moved to New York, where she took up residency at the Chelsea Hotel. While based in New York, she traveled extensively, notably to Cuba and China. In 2017, she relocated to Los Angeles. By temperament and experience a cosmopolitan, L. moved across cultures and geographies with the same openness and ease with which she moved across artistic disciplines and tendencies.

Her work is intentionally hybrid: she made paintings that become performative, sculptures intended as functional objects for the domestic space, and films that merge the documentary and the experimental. Physically and symbolically interconnecting bodies in public space, her performances bridge the self and the collective, engendering forms of resistance against received cultural and social constructs and dominant power structures.

Articulated on two floors, the show starts with an emphasis on her meditation on the body, language, and space, connecting the intimate and the public. It features a selection of soft, sewn paintings from the 1970s on the notion of skin and surface, where the cotton canvas is transformed into a wearable, performative object. Conceived as banners for public protests, these works bear incisive statements of resistance—which also form the pieces’ individual titles—suggesting a utopian sense of collectivity and equality. Chief among them are We Don’t Want War (ca. 1974/1995)—a piece wearable by a single person, in which the reference to painting’s rectangular plane is underscored only to emphasize the subversion of it from within—and larger pieces conceived to interconnect larger numbers of people, such as We Want to Breathe (1975) and Same Skin for Everybody (1975). With their powerful simplicity, they all give the viewer much to consider, especially in light of today’s social and political turmoil.

The exhibition design—realized by the Berlin-based Studio Manuel Raeder in dialogue with the show’s curator Leonie Radine—effectively punctuates the space with a series of display cardboard-and-metal structures which, in the first room, bring the urban dimension into the gallery space by showing large-scale archival images of 1970s street protests featuring L.’s banners, as well as images of the artist slipping into her wearable pieces.

The banners stem from the “pénétrable” works that L. started to make in the mid-1960s, after abandoning abstract painting. In these life-size textile works she first created openings for heads, arms and legs, making them wearable. Quintessential examples include Flower (1974), Human (1974–78), and Ciel (1976), which are displayed together in the exhibition along with the larger Sun & Moon Giant Pénétrables (ca. 1996). Bearing their title text, they evoke an underlying aspiration to communion with the natural environment and the cosmos—themes that recur also in some collages and drawings made in the 1970s and 1990s.

Defying the notion of a fixed identity, the “pénétrables” have no gender, ethnic, or class identification, encapsulating the artist’s interest in humanity at large. An early, transitional work leading to their production is the small oil-on-canvas Early Blue Pénétrable (1965), set in dialogue, here, with the large-scale installation La Chambre en Fourrure [Fur Room] (1970/2020) that takes the performative aspect of the “pénétrables” to an environmental scale. While L.’s soft paintings on the wall await someone to inhabit them and bring them to life, a number of 1970s films, shown in their proximity, beautifully capture collective performances with the “pénétrables” on an Ibiza beach or on the streets of Brussels.

The critique of dominant forms of representation of women is encapsulated in the sculptural installation Nine Femmes Fatales in a Black Coat (1996), related to a performance piece of the same year that started at La MaMa Theatre before moving through the East Village in New York. It commemorates nine women whose lives met early, tragic, or violent ends—Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Ulrike Meinhof, and Billie Holiday, among others—pointing at the tensions between their life and how history, or the media, have represented it. The performers are enveloped into one body of black plastic skin, and they carry the women’s names written on their masked visages. This notion of the shared body, of the “same skin for everybody,” takes on new life in Blue Cape, which was staged between 2002 to 2008 in Cuba, along the Great Wall in China, at the Venice Film Festival, and in the European Parliament in Brussels. Asked by the artist to highlight the fundamental concepts at the heart of a progressive evolution of society, the caped performers “invade” the European Parliament holding banners that read “KNOW YOUR RIGHTS.” An action that acquires a fresh urgency today, as fundamental rights are under siege.

On the upper floor, L.’s “functional sculptures,” as she called them, take center stage, underscoring her reflection on the body as fragment. They span the years from the 1960s to the 2000s. Generally shaped in the form of body parts—feet, eyes, a silhouetted head, and so on—they serve as sofas, tables, lamps, libraries, and drawers. Their function is beautifully immortalized in a large-scale archival photograph of the artist sitting comfortably on one of her sculptures, on view in the room. Begun in 1967, while L. was spending time in New York, these works are mindful of Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures, but they develop a singular language that blurs the boundaries between the aesthetic and the everyday, the intimate and the social in ways all its own. Witty, but sometimes also traversed by an undercurrent of potential violence, these objects infiltrate domesticity, critiquing prescribed social and gender-based roles. While further exploring the notion of skin as threshold—as membrane connecting the inner and the outer worlds—these works dismantle preconceived notions of the body, particularly the female body, and interrogate its relation to everyday life at home. A case in point is Woman Ironing Table #1 (2005), an ironing board in the form of an abstracted female body with a phallus-shaped iron. Across the room, Little TV Woman: “I Am the Last Woman Object” (1969), from which the show borrows its title, addresses the objectification of the female body. The soft sculpture is shaped as a woman’s body with a television monitor in place of her belly. Addressed directly to the viewer, the following words appear (in English) on the monitor, while simultaneously resounding in the recorded artist’s voice (in French): “I am the last woman object / You can take my lips / Touch my breasts / My stomach / My sex / But I repeat it, it is the last time.” Interestingly, the work was originally displayed in the window of the jewelry boutique Alfred Van Cleef in Paris.

With its hallmark wit and its invitation to break down boundaries, Nicola L.’s practice points at the powers of art as a form of resistance, celebrating interconnection. In so doing, by extension, it underscores the subversive quality of culture’s “social intimacy”—an indispensable element in the face of our hyper-technological times.