The Skin of Things
Elisabetta Garletti, Burlington Contemporary
June 2022
‘Skin is the place where one touches and is touched by others; it is both the most intimate of experiences and the most public marker of raced, sexed and national histories’. In the preface to Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey’s edited volume Thinking through the Skin, the body’s largest organ is described as simultaneously private and public, as an inescapable marker of difference, but also as a site of connectedness. Such an understanding of skin as a political terrain resonates across the eclectic, sensuous and playful body of work by Nicola L. (1932–2018) on display at Alison Jacques, London.
Spanning fifty years of the French-Moroccan artist’s career, it is the first solo exhibition of Nicola L.’s work in the United Kingdom and anticipates a major survey at Camden Art Centre, London, in 2024. The exhibition joins a series of recent initiatives – such as the 2015–16 Tate Modern, London, group show The World Goes Pop and the artist’s institutional survey at SculptureCentre, New York, in 2017 – that have drawn attention to the practice of a significant twentieth-century figure who, like many of her female contemporaries, had fallen through the cracks of art history.