If you were to imagine a meeting point between Pop Art, Surrealism and feminist performance, the result might well be Nicola L. Born in Morocco as Nicole Jeannine Suzanne Leuthe and later based in France, she belonged to the politically engaged, protest generation of the 1960s and became one of the key figures of second-wave feminist art in the twentieth century. To give you a sense of her significance, she stands alongside artists such as Niki de Saint Phalle, Judy Chicago, and Louise Bourgeois.
The M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp is currently presenting the major retrospective When the Earth Turned the Other Way (26 June – 18 October 2026). In my view, following the political controversy surrounding the proposed merger with Ghent’s S.M.A.K., the museum has regained its momentum and is now producing a remarkable programme of exhibitions. Contemporary art -and the institutions that support it – often benefits from moments of upheaval. After all, contemporary art thrives on provocation and radical gestures.
Conceived as an extension of the museum’s own collection, the exhibition builds on M HKA’s holdings of two works by Nicola L., Silence and No War.
Curator Joanna Zielinska quite literally stepped into Nicola L.’s skin, revealing the full spectrum of her nomadic life and artistic practice, and successfully inhabiting the museum space with works across different media. I use this metaphor deliberately, because we need to remember the central project with which Nicola L. entered art history.
Pénétrables (French for “penetrables”, or “those one can enter”) is a series of interactive objects that viewers can wear, inhabit, or literally step inside. Unlike traditional sculpture, which is typically only viewed from the outside, works from the Pénétrables series are activated by the human body: the person becomes part of the artwork itself.
These works take the form of large textile or vinyl constructions – costume-like structures, sheets or envelopes with openings for the head, arms and legs, and sometimes entire spatial environments or rooms one can enter. In some cases, several people can wear a single piece at the same time, turning it into a collective performance.
The most famous example is Red Coat, a giant coat designed for eleven people. It appears as a striking red presence that confronts you upon entering the exhibition space.
How Red Coat came into being
In the late 1960s, Nicola L. lived and worked between Paris and Ibiza. At that time, she was just beginning to move away from painting and towards the idea of art as a “second skin” – objects that can be worn and entered.
In Ibiza she found herself within a highly free, almost utopian artistic environment, where musicians, poets and avant-garde artists constantly intersected. It was there that she was approached by the Brazilian musicians Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, who were looking for a visual element for a major festival performance.
Nicola L. did not design a costume or a stage set, but something else entirely – a vast vinyl оболочка, into which several people could enter simultaneously. This is how the idea of Red Coat was born – a “red coat for eleven bodies”. During the performance, participants took turns and sometimes entered the object together, putting it on from the inside, until the group of musicians and performers gradually transformed into a single moving being. The music was playing, the festival space was loud and open, and suddenly, within it, this strange red mass appeared – no longer individual bodies, but a unified form moving as one organism.
It was in Ibiza that the long life of Red Coat began. The performance was later restaged in different cities and contexts – from street actions to museum performances. Yes, Ibiza today may have become a playground for the wealthy, but in the 1960s it was a rebellious island of artists. If you want to take striking photographs, wear black or white – against the artwork you will stand out beautifully.
The way the Pénétrables function was demonstrated to us by the artist’s son, Christophe Lanzenberg (and son of the gallerist Fred Lanzenberg), who grew up surrounded by the artistic avant-garde between Paris, Brussels and Ibiza, where his family’s everyday life was closely intertwined with his mother’s artistic practice. When he was 18, the family moved to New York (one can only envy the atmosphere in which the young man found himself). Today he and his brother David live in Los Angeles and work in the film industry as cinematographers. Christophe looks after his mother’s legacy, helped organise the exhibition, and attended the opening on 25 June. Charming, with French flair and American dynamism.
In the 1960s, Nicola L. met the Belgian gallerist Fred Lanzenberg. Their relationship developed within the artistic milieu of Paris and Brussels during the 1960s, where galleries, artists and critics formed a single, living field of exchange, and professional collaboration quickly evolved into a family story.
In 1966, Fred founded his gallery in Brussels, Galerie Fred Lanzenberg, located at Avenue des Klauwaerts 9 in Ixelles (no longer in existence). The gallery initially presented Pop Art, later New Realism and the French avant-garde, and worked with artists such as Erro, Takis, Fromanger, and other figures of the post-war European scene.
Thanks to her husband, Nicole became closely acquainted with Belgian artists. One of her closest friends and advisers was Marcel Broodthaers. When the artist developed the idea of her surreal anthropomorphic lamps, he acted as a “conduit” between the concept and production – an important point, because in the 1960s and 1970s such objects could not simply be “commissioned” like design pieces.
It all began when Nicole showed him her sketches: eyes, lips and fragments of faces transformed into lamps. In her logic, these were not decorative objects, but extensions of corporeality – light as an extension of the body, the object as an organ.
Broodthaers, at the time a key figure within the Brussels conceptual art circle, responded as someone who understood the conceptual stakes. He helped her establish contact with a plastics factory in Antwerp, where industrial moulding techniques were used (in particular, plastic forming and serial production of objects).
It was there that her drawings first became physical objects – lamps that could be produced and repeated. From private sketches and artistic visions, they were transformed into reproducible functional objects, positioned on the boundary between art, design and mass production. This became the basis of her Functional Objects series, where body, object and everyday life merge into a single system.
Financially, this series significantly supported Nicole during her early years in the United States.
At the exhibition we can see her famous “Woman-Drawer” (Orange Femme Commode) – a striking feminist statement in which the artist quite literally shows how the female body is turned into an object within culture.
All those functional little drawers, “for this and that”, become part of the work’s logic. The idea is to transform the female figure into a chest of drawers, so that the viewer immediately sees and physically feels the concept of objectification – the woman as a “thing” that can be used, stored and looked at, like furniture in an interior.
In doing so, Nicole makes the problem of “woman as object rather than subject” physically self-evident. And, as an object, the piece is also very elegantly designed.
Another feminist statement, Little TV Woman, is a soft sculpture of a female figure with a television embedded in her abdomen, from which the phrase “I am the last object-woman” is broadcast.
The work reflects how the female body is transformed into a media object in the contemporary world – a body that “speaks” through technology and thereby simultaneously represents and critiques the idea of woman as object, pushed to its limit within the mass culture of magazines and television.
It is a strikingly prescient theme for the 1970s and 1980s.
Yes, women occupied a central place in Nicola L.’s work. Among other projects, she created the Femmes Fatales series, a cycle of collages in which historical and popular female figures – from Frida Kahlo to Marilyn Monroe – are transformed into a shared visual field composed of newspaper fragments, words and cultural clichés.
She collected and rearranged words such as “witch”, “victim”, “beauty” and “rebel”, revealing how female identity is constructed through recurring cultural labels and media narratives. Each Femme Fatale ceases to represent a single type of woman and instead becomes a way of thinking about how society constructs female images through language, headlines and stereotypes, turning them into figures that are at once instantly recognisable and assembled from fragments – a recurring theme throughout Nicola L.’s practice.
In her memoirs, Nicole wrote:
“When I began the first series of Femmes Fatales, it quickly became an obsession. I read only about women – Cleopatra, Billie Holiday, Joan of Arc, Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo, Madame Bovary. They were a group, a clan. I saw them everywhere, especially in newspaper headlines. I cut out these words and brought them together – they turned into a kind of poetry. Each femme fatale could be represented by the same words, simply arranged differently.”
The title of the exhibition
Nicole was arrested in Lebanon and spent several months in detention during a trip to the Middle East. The circumstances were politically and bureaucratically entangled – she was held without any proper artistic or diplomatic framework, in a situation of complete loss of control over both her body and her freedom.
This experience is directly linked to her work When the Earth Turned the Other Way, a graphic and narrative piece in which bodies, arms and legs appear in a desolate, “inverted” world, as if the human being has been stripped of familiar coordinates and social structures.
Yet the artist never regretted this period of imprisonment. She spent time with women who had mostly been incarcerated for killing abusive husbands, and this encounter profoundly expanded her understanding of women’s lives, prison, and the Middle East.
She herself was an entirely Western, independent woman, yet one who had grown up in Morocco. As a result, she developed a series of tarot cards that fascinated her fellow inmates. In her artistic logic, tarot resonated with her ongoing concerns: working with destiny as a kind of script, transforming the body into a sign (lamps, furniture, objects), and constructing the human figure from fragments.
The women in detention, meanwhile, simply hoped for a better future – they looked for signs that their fate might change. But in contemporary art, an artist inevitably transforms any lived experience into conceptual work.
Her style is often described as “radical design” because Nicola L. completely erased the boundary between art, design and the human body.
- A fusion of art, performance and space
Her objects function as stages for action – environments in which something happens rather than objects to be simply observed. - She transformed objects into “bodies”. Ordinary things ceased to be neutral. A sofa became a female body, a lamp a fragment of a person, a chest of drawers a “hidden organism”. This disrupted the conventional understanding of design as purely functional form.
3.Design became interactive
Her objects could be touched, and sometimes entered (as in the Pénétrables), allowing physical interaction with the work.
4. A strong social and feminist dimension
She rethought the female body as a consumer object, the role of women within the home (furniture, interior space), and the boundary between the human body and domestic “objects”. This made her work explicitly critical and political.
5. A break with classical design
At the time, traditional design was functional, comfortable and neutral. In contrast, Nicola L.’s work is emotional, strange, sometimes “uncomfortable” and deliberately provocative.
That is why Nicola L. is often described as a precursor of contemporary immersive and conceptual design.
Radical, because she arrived at a simple but, at the time, shocking conclusion: objects can be bodies, bodies can be objects, and the viewer can become part of the artwork itself.