Alma Feigis on the artist’s Museion retrospective, an exhibition that reveals her fluid and boundless attitude to both making and living.
Bolzano’s Museion is not a home-like building, as far as art institutions go, but its rectangular, glass-faced, high-ceilinged galleries are – for the duration of their current retrospective of Nicola L. – softened and domesticated. The vast architecture of the exhibition spaces is broken apart by plywood panels and platforms washed with purple, orange, brown, and green hues, demarcating open, room-like spaces designed to house Nicola’s creations. An off-white leather couch in the form of a palm invites bodies to be cupped, eye-shaped lamps stare from the wall, bright and unblinking, while a clothing iron cast into a phallus sits blunt and immovable on its board just around the corner. “The work at first seems very playful and humorous, but then you discover their political dimensions, and a certain darkness behind them,” curator Leonie Radine tells me. “Nicola had this intention – she wasn’t just being a light, soft figure. At times, she was strategic, even emphasising and replicating the problem.” Femme Commode (1969), her unmistakable chest of drawers shaped like a woman’s torso with nipples for handles, borrows its French title from both “cabinet” and, as Nicola’s son tells me, a “convenient” or “easy” woman.
Featuring eighty-some works spanning five decades, this exhibition offers the most comprehensive perspective yet on the artist’s practice, marking the culmination of an institutional tour that began almost two years ago at London’s Camden Art Centre. But these objects aren’t supposed to be here; they are works made for the home. The marks on their surfaces reveal their unsparing use – traces of the past lives they have absorbed: scuffs from her children climbing on the faded leather hand, using her Femme Commode as a sock drawer, imperfections that make the works even more compelling. “I think she had a big, strong belief that art has a transformative potential,” Radine notes. “Like her sofas, the work is bound to lived experience, lived spaces. Nicola wanted to live with art, not to make it for something abstract.” I sat across from Nicola’s grandson over an Italian-Japanese fusion dinner and spoke about the creativity that both our grandmothers folded into our lives: mine, knitting and sewing scarves and dresses galore, and his designing delightful domestic objects imbued with humour and wit. The sentimentalism over Nicola that evening was allowed not just by two strong sake martinis, but also the manner in which her work was presented; while so many retrospectives make legends of their subjects, stripping them of their complexities and anchoring them in the past, this show presents the fluid and sometimes flawed Nicola.
Though the first floor of the museum is dedicated to her exploration of art as activism, while the second is centred on her meditations on the domestic sphere, this divide feels more like a pragmatic spatial division than a strict compartmentalisation. None of these individual properties defined her. The space, conceived by Studio Manuel Raeder, reflects the softness and permeability that defined so much of Nicola’s art and life, and celebrates her multiplicities, standing her films alongside textiles, her sketches alongside sculptures and guiding an understanding of their interrelation.
Perhaps it was her film photographs that stretched across the museum’s wall, or the wit and timelessness of the work itself, or maybe the current political climate, but the exhibition enabled the extension of my view beyond the historical veil and an understanding of this figure for who she was: a creative and complex figure, driven by instinct and pleasure as much as comradeship and resistance, whose gestures of care were never naïve and extended to both her public and private worlds. “There was love of all kinds that she gave,” Radine adds. “To her sons, to all these boyfriends, but also to this love of solidarity, to other freedom fighters and figures of resistance. What drove her was these friendships.” From protests and parties, perhaps forming connections and networks between people, media, and genres was Nicola’s form.
While the artist attempted to make the lives of those around her better, she also made sure to enjoy her own. “There was also something that was far from strategic; this intuitiveness and unseriousness also speaks from her work,” Radine affirms. Nicola lived “without boundaries, skirting the edges of various movements and committing to none of them, and creating her art accordingly,” as Milly Burroughs wrote of the artist on the occasion of her Apartmento monograph; the retrospective laughs alongside Nicola about her prison stint for possession in Barcelona and her various dalliances with art world stars when she fancied a sojourn at the Hotel Chelsea or a prolonged period in Ibiza. It was on the island that she forged a creative and pastoral friendship with Alberto Greco, who encouraged Nicola to explore more conceptual forms than the figures she was drawing at the time. All of a sudden, while splayed on a beach with Greco and a mutual friend, she felt as though their three bodies had become a single form – a terrifying, cosmic experience that proved liberating for her mind and practice, inspiring her to create the first Pénétrables. Grotesque at their core, these skin suits hang limp on the walls, eyes and mouths cockled inwards as they await activation – to engulf their wearer and, in an instant, transform their perception through a body not their own.
Nicola had no oversized utopian fantasies – rather, she found points within the world around her, those on the streets and in her home, that she could enact real meaning and transformation onto, to disrupt and disarm the habitus through a gentleness and plain weirdness. There is nothing more to this point than her famous Pénétrables, which she also developed into wearable protest banners bearing slogans like We Don’t Want War, We Want to Breathe, and Same Skin for Everybody (all 1975). Not dissimilar were her various coats, which saw strangers bundled together under one huge poncho – a colourful “splotch,” as Nicola once wrote, “walking and running through the grey cities, disturbing the order, the uniformity, forgetting boundaries.” Born to French parents in Morocco and living between Paris, Brussels, Ibiza, and New York, Nicola came to understand that a true grasping of our neighbours’ experiences is inseparable from the pursuit of justice and peace. Nicola’s politics of gentleness took shape through such simple gestures – laughing together on anthropomorphic sofas, brushing past one another under bright plastic ponchos, slipping into these strange skins – a non-violent, quotidian counter-protest. The artist envisioned a world liberated from the volatile, authoritarian governments that continue to affect our present, one where her delirious optimism prevailed.
