M HKA presents: ​
​Nicola L. — When the Earth Turned the Other Way

Through her first Belgian retrospective, M HKA presents a posthumous tribute to the politically engaged and free-spirited French artist Nicola L. Around ninety works, including pieces from the museum’s own collection, highlight her diverse and multidisciplinary practice, ranging from performance and design to visual art and film.

Despite her strong ties to Belgium and connections with artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, as a female artist, she has largely eluded recognition within the canon of art history since the 1980s. With this exhibition, M HKA reintroduces her work to a wider audience, placing particular emphasis on her Belgian period during the 1960s and 1970s.

Visitors will encounter a colourful and accessible world infused with humour and subtle surrealist elements. The exhibition is accompanied by a digital platform developed by M HKA, featuring films and archival materials that offer deeper insight into Nicola L.’s practice. Nicola L. – When the Earth Turned the Other Way opens to the public on June 26.

A Nomadic Journey

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Nicola L., who was born in Morocco in 1932, worked across Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, and Ibiza. During this time, she became part of an intellectual and artistic milieu within the post-war European avant-garde. In the 1980s, she settled in the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York. She passed away in Los Angeles in 2018, where her estate was subsequently established.

Her multidisciplinary practice – encompassing film, textiles, sculpture, and drawing – can be situated within conceptual art, pop art, and nouveau réalisme.

“We are delighted to honour Nicola L. with this extensive overview of her work. Her oeuvre is both eclectic and expansive, with humour and wit consistently at its core. This exhibition focuses on her formative years in Belgium, France, and Ibiza.” ​
​— M HKA curator Joanna Zielińska

Alongside close friendships with French art critic Pierre Restany and Argentine conceptual artist Alberto Greco, Nicola L. frequently collaborated with Belgian visual artist Marcel Broodthaers. He supported her in developing some of her most iconic works, such as the lips and eyes lamps. “When I show him the drawings of the objects in search of a factory to make them, he takes me to his plastic factory in Antwerp,” Nicola L. wrote in her unpublished memoirs DIVE. “These 2 objects, in different editions, have helped me to survive since my arrival in New York in 1979.” At the same time, her dreamy, surreal, and witty imagery clearly echoes the influence of Magritte.

IDuring her years in Paris, she became close to Brussels-based gallery owner Fred Lanzenberg. They married and had two sons together. In 1976, she presented a major exhibition in Antwerp. She also found solace in her home in Ibiza, where she was closely connected to a community of Latin American artists. It was there that she created her well-known 'Pénétrables', artworks designed to be worn like garments. In 1979, she moved to New York, where film became an increasingly important medium in her artistic practice.

The title of the exhibition refers to a pivotal event in her life. While travelling to Lebanon, she was imprisoned for several months. This experience inspired her to create When the Earth Turned the Other Way, a graphic novel in which hands, feet, and a group of people occupy a desolate landscape. In this alternative sci-fi narrative, she turns away from dominant systems that instrumentalise bodies, the environment, and social relationships. The title also alludes to the 1960s and 1970s, a period in which alternative social imaginaries were often pushed to the side.

Welcome to the world of Nicola L.: ​
​from ‘Pénétrables’ to iconic design

Nicola L.’s work is deeply informed by her political convictions and feminist perspective. She explores the representation of (female) bodies – both in their physical presence and within broader social contexts – approaching them with a sense of freedom and without prejudice. The exhibition foregrounds her iconic functional objects and 'Pénétrables', presented within their original context.

Nicola L. doesn’t just shape household design objects like body parts, she explores how visitors can themselves embody art. Her ‘Pénetrables’ take that very literally: they are big canvases which you can dress yourself with just like an article of clothing. This way you become part of the art work. The works aren’t static, they are activated by human bodies. The exhibition further contextualises her artistic universe and trajectory through an extensive selection of sketches, archival photographs, and video material.

The exhibition opens with Red Coat, arguably her most iconic work. This monumental coat, designed for eleven people and made of vinyl, was originally created for a concert by Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso in Ibiza. By enveloping its wearers in a single shared garment, it strips away individual identity and invites a collective performance, like a second skin. With a subtle sense of humour, Nicola L. poses the question of whether our similarities outweigh our differences. The piece travelled widely and was repeatedly activated in cities such as London, Barcelona (where she was almost arrested during the Franco regime) and Antwerp.

Many of the wearable works on display come from the M HKA collection. Photos and videos from the museum archive show how art works were brought to life. The ‘Pénétrables’ for example were even worn at home by her grandson. Her comedic sci-fi short film Sand, Sea, Sky shows how the world originated with ‘Pénétrables’. A copy of her biggest take on the concept, La chambre en Fourrure (from the M HKA collection) can physically be entered. This immense cube with violet-coloured fake fur invites visitors to feel their way around and explore through zippers and big openings. Nicola L. once described it as a “house made of empty figures that you can enter, envelopes of empty human bodies that you can penetrate.”

The second part of the exhibition emphasizes her ‘Functional Objects’. With wit and irony, she translates the objectification of the female body into furniture, blurring the boundaries between art and design. In her daily life, she surrounded herself with this furniture and even decorated her loft and apartment in the Chelsea Hotel with it. The exhibition presents her Yellow Snail Lamp, Library Head, Canapé Homme Géant, Orange Femme Commode, Woman Pregnant From TV Cabinet, … A table with egg shells references Marcel Broodthaers and his poetic visual language explicitly. Also on display are Femme, a sofa shaped like a woman from the M HKA collection, her lips and eyes lamps produced in Antwerp, and her sculptural Feet, originally shown at Galerie Kontact in Antwerp in 1969.

Finally, the ‘Femme Fatales’ series will also be presented. Nicola L. made a series of collages inspired by the pop art style about historical female figures, such as Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse and Marilyn Monroe.

"When I started the first series of 'Femmes Fatales' it rapidly became an obsession. I couldn't read anything except about those women; Cleopatra, Billie Holiday, Joanne d'Arc, Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo and Madame Bovary. They were a group, a clan. I could see them everywhere, especially in the headlines of the newspapers: "Lady with an attitude - witch. Bitch. Victim. Child. Mundered. Hooker. Beauty. [...]”. I was cutting all these words in the newspaper, putting them together, they become sort of poems. Each femme fatale could be represented by the same words arranged differently."
​— Nicola L., in her unpublished memoirs

Public programme

An extensive public programme offers both entertainment and deeper insight into the exhibition:

Made possible by National Lottery players, thanks to whom the National Lottery supports the exhibition Nicola L. – When the Earth Turned the Other Way.

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