In Susie Orbach’s 1978 outdated but still-pertinent anti-diet book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, she quotes John Berger’s Ways of Seeing:

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women, but also the relation of women to themselves.

Orbach goes on to comment, “This emphasis on presentation as the central aspect of a woman’s existence makes her extremely self-conscious. It demands that she occupy herself with a self-image that others […] will convey what kind of woman she is. Fat as softness, as resistance to the male sexual gaze, is the psychological territory conflict here.” In the work of Nicola L., whose exhibition I Am The Last Woman Object shows at Museion in Bolzano, Italy, until 1st March 2026, softness becomes a strategy that doesn’t provoke more fear, but inveigles in valuable, more humane forms of subversion.

Born Nicola Leuthe in Morocco in 1932 to a French military family, she moved frequently, according to where her father was stationed. After formal art training in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, Nicola became aware of the prejudice faced by female artists, and stopped using her surname to sound less gendered. Continuing in the nomadic spirit of her childhood, she moved frequently, with stints at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, as well as time spent in Ibiza, Brussels, Montauk and Paris. The exhibition title, borrowed from a seminal work of hers, succinctly draws on her ability to take parts of the whole and let them stand symbolically and aesthetically for our desires, fears and general peculiarities. Across the show, this philosophy plays out in drawings, furniture and communal costumes, speaking to how we touch and handle the things and the people around us.

This iteration at the Museion, the last of a four-venue tour, was developed in collaboration with Berlin’s Studio Manuel Raeder. With the curators, material and the estate, the design studio has magnified the porousness of her work, the sense of collective permeability. Her Pénétrables series, which she began in the mid-1960s, took the form of canvases, capes, coats and environments in which one person – or many people – could in slip their heads, arms, legs, or their entire bodies. Skin is the most sensitive part of our body, as well as the organ that most connects inside and outside, and Nicola’s work reflects a utopian aspiration of creating a shared skin, regardless of class, ethnicity, or gender.

In French, pénétrable is both an adjective that means something that can be entered, as well as describing something that can be understood, like a comprehensible idea. It also recalls pénétrer, to penetrate sexually. Her work plays with the subversion of the male and female sexual form: in the early 1970s, she was arrested in Lebanon for cannabis possession, and across several months of incarceration, she created an illustrated narrative about a male foot and a female buttock navigating social and gender roles. Her work was not just produced for the white cube gallery space but brought to the streets at the boundaries of art and life. In the same sense, the domestic environments that Nicola furnished with her functional objects – soft sculptures, cupboards, sofa – while playful and humorous, also comment adroitly on traditional gender roles in the home. Studio Manuel Raeder’s exhibition design creates rooms, platforms, corners and shapes to elevate her practice away from the realm of commodified designer objects: Conran Shop, this isn’t.

The Museion exhibition is part of an ongoing sequence of shows, events, and research looking at artistic representations of “soft resistance”. Perhaps this bracketing is somewhat at odds with some of how her work has been documented, such as a video on her friendship with Abbie Hoffman, an activist who was hiding from the law, or her inclusion of Red Army Faction militant Ulrike Meinhof in her work Nine Historic Hysteric Women (2006). This riskiness is maybe why her objects and images become more than simply clothing, action, or depictions of feminism: they exude a rare, lived-in force of conviction, outlining a person whose commitment to art was confrontational, personal and endlessly generative. .