Artist & Designer: Nicola L.
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Nicola L.
1937–2018

Nicola L.'s playful and heady blend of feminism, body politics, humor, and pop sensibility make her one of the leading figures to have emerged from the recent re-examinations of the Pop Art movement. We are proud to bring her iconic and provocative works of art and design to auction.

It is a vehicle for entering the human body into dialogue with architecture, clothing, and furniture, to direct attention to the superficial layers that compose all structures, including bodies: the shell can be understood as both architecture and skin.

Ruba Katrib, curator of Nicola L's 2017 retrospective at the Sculpture Center, New York

Iconic Works

For over five decades, Nicola L. created works at the intersection of performance, politics, the avant-garde, and functional design. While she was creating in the midst of the Pop Art movement and second-wave feminism and can be associated with both, Nicola L. had a distinct and singular voice that refused categorization and investigated more deeply the implications of these movements with equal parts irreverence and warmth.

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In 1964, Nicola L. burned all of her paintings; goaded by one of her early mentors, Alberto Greco, who after meeting Duchamp asked Nicola, “How can you paint in the 1960s?” With ties to artists like Yves Klein, the critic Pierre Restany and the Parisian Nouveau Réalisme group, Nicola L. began making the seminal works she is best known for today.

My [work is] an ephemeral monument to freedom and freedom is not for sale.

Nicola L.

Total Habitation

The Multi-Disciplinary Work of Nicola L.

Not content with limiting herself to art, design, performance and politics, Nicola L. was also a filmmaker, fully inhabiting and capturing the many worlds in which she moved, whether that was music festivals, political rallies, downtown clubs or the Chelsea Hotel, where she kept a room for over thirty years. Nicola L.'s most well known works in this medium are a recording of the punk band Bad Brains at CBGB in 1980, a 1981 documentary about activist Abbie Hoffman, My Name is Abbie: Orphan of America and the 2011 documentary Doors Ajar at the Chelsea Hotel. She was also part of the milieu of musicians in the 1960s and 1970s, both in Europe and in downtown New York, staging performances for bands like Soft Machine, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso.

Le main-canapé (Hand Sofa), 1970. Photograph by Brigitte Muus, 1972.

Nicola L. 1937–2018

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Nicola L.'s playful and heady blend of feminism, body politics, humor and a pop sensibility make her one of the leading figures to have emerged from the recent re-examinations of the Pop Art movement. Her iconic and provocative works blur the distinction between art and design, nudging viewers to change the way they inhabit space and use objects.

Nicola L. was born in Mazagan, Morocco in 1937 later moving to and growing up in Paris. As a young woman, she attended the Académie Julian before studying at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. While at the prestigious school, Nicola L. felt stifled by its traditional approach to art making and its aesthetic and philosophical conservatism. After graduating, she became associated with the Parisian Nouveau Réalisme group, which included Arman, Christo, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely; the movement was seen as a European counterpart to the Pop Art movement. Critic and founder of the movement Pierre Restany described it as "a poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality," in that it rejected the lyricism of abstraction and the traditional nature of figuration and instead used reality as its medium to create performances, collages and assemblages that worked to deconstruct the special, singular nature of the art object.