Marisol: A Retrospective

Of all the Pop artists of the 1960s, Marisol remains the most enigmatic. By examining and contextualizing her work over its long arc from the 1950s to the early 2000s, this internationally touring retrospective, the most comprehensive survey of Marisol Escobar’s work ever assembled, demonstrates the extraordinary relevance of the legendary artist’s unique vision of culture and society.

Marisol (Venezuelan and American, born France, 1930–2016) remains perhaps the most intriguing and least understood artist associated with Pop Art. Born María Sol Escobar in Paris to a Venezuelan family, by the mid-1960s Marisol had been lauded as the female artist of her generation proclaimed the “only girl artist with glamour” for her fashion sense and the “Latin Garbo” for her apparent exoticism, legendary beauty, and famed silences. Thousands lined up to see her remarkable life-size Pop Art sculptures, but much of the attention would evaporate as her work became more solemn following her retreat from the art world in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her 2016 obituary in the Guardian announced her as “Marisol: the forgotten star of pop art.”

Far more than a muse or an icon of a single decade, Marisol created art that in radical ways addressed challenging and urgent issues of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. While celebrating her satirical and deceptively political sculptures and self-portraits of the 1960s, the exhibition also assembles, for the first time, lesser-known areas of her practice. In addition to her works about the life of the oceans, are those that engage with hunger, interpersonal violence, and modern gender norms. Her collaborative work with dance companies and her public sculpture, an important area of activity for Marisol from the 1970s onward, will at last receive their proper due. By examining and contextualizing her work over its long arc from the 1950s to the early 2000s, this internationally touring retrospective, the most comprehensive survey of her work ever assembled, demonstrates the extraordinary relevance of Marisol’s unique vision of culture and society.

The exhibition largely draws on the significant collection of artworks Marisol kept in her personal possession and left to the Buffalo AKG upon her death, in a historic and transformative bequest. 

Credit: Overview from museum website

Image credit: The Generals, 1961–62. Marisol. Wood, mixed media, and sound recording. Collection Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1962 (K1962:7). © Estate of Marisol / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.