Nicola L.: Works, 1968 to the Present
SculptureCenter, Long Island
18 September – 18 December 2017
‘Nicola L.: Works, 1968 to the Present’, 2017, exhibition view, SculptureCenter, New York; photo: Kyle Knodell
‘Nicola L.: Works, 1968 to the Present’, 2017, exhibition view, SculptureCenter, New York; photo: Kyle Knodell
‘Nicola L.: Works, 1968 to the Present’, 2017, exhibition view, SculptureCenter, New York; photo: Kyle Knodell
‘Nicola L.: Works, 1968 to the Present’, 2017, exhibition view, SculptureCenter, New York; photo: Kyle Knodell
Alison Jacques Gallery is delighted to announce ‘Nicola L.: Works, 1968 to the Present’ at SculptureCenter, New York, the artist’s first institutional survey to date. Curated by Ruba Katrib, the exhibition includes works from her wide-reaching oeuvre from the late 1960s to 2000s, from ‘functional art’ to paintings, collages and films.
Nicola L.’s work takes up notions of skin and surface, often breaking apart representations of the body and turning them into furniture-like objects and vice versa. Dressers, lamps, sofas and other items resembling human forms comprise her functional objects. This body of work appears as a cast of characters, physically confronting their human counterparts as they open and close, turn off and on, and store personal items. Her series of ‘Penetrable’ works, conceived to be entered or worn by viewers and/or performers, extends the body’s exterior, skin, into vinyl and textile casings that enclose single or multiple bodies within another layer of material.
Nicola L.’s iconic performative sculpture The Red Coat: Same Skin for Everyone, first performed on stage in a music festival in 1970 for the Tropicália musicians Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, is represented at SculptureCenter through a compilation of documentary footage of various happenings around the world. Other works in the exhibition have previously been used as functional art, while others are iterations of works made over the decades. Her series of ‘Femme Fatale’ paintings (1995) features portraits of famous women who have faced a range of injustices based on their gender and the social and political circumstances under which they lived. These works are part of Nicola L.’s reclamation of female voices through her work, as well her extensive use of collage and narrative. Similar strategies are evident in her 1975 series ‘Diario de Ibiza’, which captures political as well as other daily news events in the year of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s death.
‘Nicola L.: Works, 1968 to the Present’ is on view to the public from 18 September – 18 December 2017, and is accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication with essays by Katrib and Erica F. Battle, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art.