After the Moroccan-born French artist Nicola L. began sketching eyes in the late 1960s, it was her Belgian friend Marcel Broodthaers who helped her turn them into lamps.
Broodthaers, who had been making artworks from thin, vacuum-formed plastic, brought Nicola to his Antwerp factory, where she produced an edition of 50 visionary lights: A bulb encased by a blue, green, or brown iris, with a movable lid-shade, was mounted on a steel rod. Years later, in 2008, she would create pendants, table lamps, and sconces for Galerie Pierre Alain-Challier in Paris.
As is apparent in the many anecdotes that punctuate the book – shared by Nicola’s close family and friends – it is impossible to separate her lived experience from her creative output.
Individually, parts of the artist’s story feel familiar; friendships with Andy Warhol, dalliances with Salvador Dalí, Ibiza and Paris eras, and extended stays at the Chelsea Hotel are all great 20th-century artist bingo card wins, but none of these things managed to define her.
She lived without boundaries, skirting the edges of various movements, committing to none of them, and creating art accordingly.
“The first Eye Lamp, conceptualised around 1969, was supposedly produced with the help of artist Marcel Broodthaers. According to her memoir, when she showed him her drawing for this piece and the Lips Lamp, Broodthaers took her to a plastic factory in Antwerp where the first ones were produced. Over the years she continued to make them in a variety of colours – one, supposedly, was used as an early rent payment at the Chelsea Hotel.” – Hannah Martin
“It’s one of the most complex pieces that she made. For me, it’s really strong and really, really, really weird. What struck me about it is that she thought of this complexity of the eyelid moving and opening and closing mechanically. There’s the right and the left eye, so then you can compose these faces.” – Omar Sosa
“It has a surreal, even haunting, presence,” says AD100 designer Adam Charlap Hyman of the fixture, the first piece of art he ever bought. He’s since used them in several projects. That’s no easy feat: The Eyes are scarce. They come up occasionally at auction (one went for $15,000 at Wright in 2021) or at Alison Jacques in London, which represents Nicola’s estate.
Gallery owner Patrick Parrish, who sold Nicola’s works on consignment in the early 2000s, now lives with an Eye in his Manhattan home, reporting: “It kinda checks you out as you walk into the room.”
Article photo cover: (c) Mark Roskams
Nicolae Baldovin
