Nicola L.
I Am The Last Woman Object
Museion is pleased to present a retrospective dedicated to the work of celebrated French artist Nicola L. (b. 1932, Morocco; d. 2018, US). Encompassing sculpture, painting, drawing, collage, performance, and film, 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 mid-1960s onward, Nicola L. developed an equally playful and radical body of work imbued with subversive wit and ideals of equality and collectivity. Although she engaged with certain artistic and activist movements and her work was often associated with Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, feminism, and design, her practice defies categorization. It further extends to various subjects such as cosmology, spirituality, sexuality, environmental protection, and political resistance.
Nicola L. 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. Her large-scale anthropomorphic sculptures, made to be used as furniture, are the most famous examples of her playful response to traditional gender roles and everyday power structures in the home. 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 the objectification of women.
Nicola L.’s leitmotif of penetrating societal boundaries is particularly evident in the large-format canvases featuring heads, sleeves, or trouser legs. Known as pénétrables, these works enable individuals to physically and imaginatively inhabit other bodies and roles, such as those of the sun, moon, and sky, and express Nicola L.’s holistic and non-egocentric view of the world. This concept was expanded upon in a suite of other interactive pieces in which multiple participants slipped into collective coats, capes, banners, rugs, and environments. The largest example of this is her emblematic Fur Room (1970/2020), a reconstruction of which will be accessible to visitors of the exhibition. A selection of these extraordinary works will be shown alongside archival performance documentation demonstrating the artist’s overarching aim of opening up new spaces for solidarity and collective action. Many of Nicola L.’s participatory, immersive textile works, such as the pivotal Red Coat (1969), stem from her 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.
The exhibition further highlights the diversity of the artist’s practice, which extends to drawings, graphic novels, collages, and experimental films. Some of her works are dedicated to influential figures, including civil rights activist Abbie Hoffman and other prominent outsiders. This is also evident in her Femmes Fatales (2006), a series of collages on bed sheets memorializing nine famous women whose lives were cut short by tragedy or violence, among them Frida Kahlo, Marilyn Monroe, and Billie Holiday.
The retrospective showcases over eighty works from five decades within an exhibition space designed by Studio Manuel Raeder. Following Nicola L.’s playful spatial approach, the scenography offers a vivid glimpse into the sites of her interventions, from her own domestic spaces to urban environments 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.
Publication:
A fully illustrated monograph with new scholarly essays and supplementary texts on major bodies of work was published by the four collaborating institutions together with Lenz Press, Milan.
Nicola L.
Born to French parents in El Jadida, Morocco, in 1932, Nicola L. studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and spent most of her life between Paris, Brussels, Ibiza, and New York, until she passed away in Los Angeles in 2018. In recent years, her work has been recognized in a solo exhibition at SculptureCenter, New York (2017), and included in important group exhibitions, such as Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009); the Liverpool Biennial (2014); The World Goes Pop, Tate Modern, London (2015); Made in L.A. 2020: A Version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; She-Bam Pow Pop Wizz ! The Amazons of Pop, Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice (2021); Future Bodies from a Recent Past—Sculpture, Technology, and the Body since the 1950s, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2022); and HOPE, Museion (2023). Her work is held in the public collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; Design Museum Brussels; Frac Bretagne, Rennes; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; M HKA, Antwerp; MAMCO Genève; and Museion, among other institutions.
Collateral program
14.10.2025
15:00-17:00
Story encounters
Social Bodies: Does slipping into a second skin alter a person’s social status? Does “disguising oneself in another body” become a means of liberation from restrictive or exclusionary patterns? How does this shift in perspective manifest when a collective body ultimately demands “one skin for all”?
17.10.2025
22:00
Guided tour (EN) with the curator Leonie Radine
20.–22.11.2025
International Symposium Culture as a Commons
12 innovative cultural initiatives from the Netherlands and Italy share their best-practice strategies and visions in relation to the question of social responsibility in cultural work. An artistic practice, like that of the pioneering Nicola L., serves here as a fitting field of action for the democratic and communal shaping of society and culture.
08.01.2026
19:00
Guided tour (DE) with the curator Leonie Radine
05.02.2025
17:00–19:00
Museion Ink
Creative writing encounters: In the Museion Ink workshop, participants will engage in automatic and personal writing inspired by the works of Nicola L. The activities will be guided, bringing to light the core themes of Nicola L.’s poetics: the importance of spaces for collective action and social engagement, the utopia of overcoming social inequalities, and the subversion of entrenched gender stereotypes in Western culture.
12.02.2026
19:00
Guided tour (IT) with the curatorial assistant Mette Zannato
Every Saturday and Sunday
14:00–18:00
Art Speakings
Group talks: During weekly art dialogues, mediators are available for individual conversations, in-depth discussions, and joint explorations.
Every Thursday
19:00
Welcome!
Free evening guided tour (IT/DE)
For the duration of the exhibition
Family Tour
Discovery tour: A special kit developed for families and children provides stimulus to discover the exhibition independently through simple, playful, interactive processes.
(IT/DE/EN) can be borrowed free of charge from the Infocenter
Nicola L.
I Am The Last Woman Object
Exhibition11.10.2025 – 01.03.2026
Curated by Leonie Radine
Mapping out an Artistic Practice: A Research project by Museion
