The beginning of the 1960s was a transformative moment for Nicola L. The artist became close to the French New Realist group, which advocated that art should comment on society using existing objects and materials. Instigated by Restany, the movement also included Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Christo and Niki de Saint Phalle. In 1964, now working between Paris and Ibiza, Nicola L. met the conceptual Argentine artist Alberto Greco. Having recently returned from New York, where he had encountered Marcel Duchamp, Greco repeatedly questioned Nicola L.'s pursuit of painting. "I burned all of my abstract paintings and made The Screen for Three People: Homage to Alberto Greco," she later reflected. "This marked the beginning of a new and totally different body of work for me, inspired by skin, which Pierre Restany called Pénétrables." These hybrid forms consisted of rectangles of stretched canvas into which viewers could insert their arms, legs or heads, becoming literally at one with art. They would often allow for multiple participants, who would appear together as a single organism. One of her most iconic works from Pénétrables, an eleven-person garment titled Red Coat (1969), was first activated in a historic performance at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970, with musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, members of the Neo-concrete movement in Brazil. "At the end of the performance we were distributing gloves on which was written 'same skin for everybody', and people started chanting the phrase."
