A French-born performer and designer who passed away in 2018, Nicola L. moved from the Académie Julian to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she worked in the studio of painter Jean Souverbie. She discovered New York in 1966, on the invitation of the experimental theater La MaMa, and settled there permanently in the late 1970s. Her conceptual work is based on two approaches that open up multiple possibilities: making bodies and making bodies. “Faire corps”, i.e. bringing bodies together in the same skin, to inhabit space together, more organically, from the inside of a second skin. Le Manteau rouge, une même peau pour tout le monde (1969) is a huge stretcherless canvas with 11 empty pockets adapted to the dimensions of 11 human bodies. The coat was designed for a performance to accompany Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso at the Isle of Wight pop music festival. Since 2002, the artist has been touring the world with his “art-skins” (Cuba, Paris, Los Angeles, the Great Wall of China, and as far afield as the European Parliament in Brussels), inviting bodies to share in his performances “the odyssey of the flesh”, as Michel Onfray puts it.

Already part of the Frac Bretagne collection with the work Tapis gris pour cinq personnes, 1975, this wide-ranging exhibition, conceived in partnership and touring with the Camden Art Center in London (UK), the Kunsthalle in Vienna (Austria) and the Museion in Bolzano (Italy), will trace the artist’s fantastic career and combine it with works by other figures from the artistic scenes she has traversed.

Curated by Géraldine Gourbe