How Nicola L. Sabotaged the Domestic
Philomena Epps, Frieze
November 2024
‘I Am The Last Woman Object’, the title of the first retrospective of the Moroccan-born French artist Nicola L. (1932–2018) in Europe, is borrowed from an early sculpture by the artist. Once displayed by the dealer Iris Clert in the window of a jewellers, Little TV Woman: ‘I Am the Last Woman Object’ (1969) is a subversive femme télévision, with a TV monitor in place of a stomach, and breasts approximated by padded cream vinyl drawers with nipple-like knobs. Playing on its screen, an audio recording declares, ‘I am the last woman object / You can take my lips / Touch my breasts, / Caress my stomach, / My sex. / But I repeat it, / it is the last time.’ The work encapsulates the way the artist’s idiosyncratic practice – which incorporates collage, sculpture, painting, performance and film – mines forms of the female body to explore gender and play, sex and domesticity.