Marisol: A Retrospective

by Marisol Escobar (Artist)

The most comprehensive volume yet published on the work and legacy of the "forgotten star of Pop art," with previously unpublished materials and new scholarly explorations In the mid-1960s Marisol was lauded as the female artist of her generation and was proclaimed to be "the only girl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 early in her career, and her celebrity nearly overshadowed her formidable accomplishments. But this attention would fade following her temporary retreat from the art world in the late 1960s and a shift in her work's subject matter. Her 2016 obituary in the Guardian described her as "the forgotten star of Pop art."
This catalog, the most comprehensive on Marisol’s work ever assembled, accompanies a major traveling retrospective organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) that reckons with the entirety of her pioneering, multifaceted, 60-year career. While celebrating her satirical and deceptively political sculptures and self-portraits that helped define the 1960s, the book’s essays also examine her works that embody animal intelligence and allude to environmental precarity, testify to interpersonal violence, engage with the immigrant experience, figure postcolonial disenfranchisement and destabilize sexual norms and gender binaries. Her public sculptures and collaborations with choreographers are examined for the first time. Assessments by leading scholars affirm Marisol’s radical legacy for the 21st century. These exciting reflections are presented alongside full-color reproductions of her works, a robust bibliography, an exhibition history and an illustrated chronology.
Marisol (1930–2016) was born Maria Sol Escobar in Paris to a Venezuelan family. She drew continually and from a young age adopted the name Marisol. Like many of the artists who emerged in the early 1950s, Marisol was at first influenced by Abstract Expressionism, but after seeing pre-Columbian art in Mexico and New York, she began making sculpture in 1954, and soon began focusing on the totemic figures for which she is best known.

Genres: Art

270 pages, Hardcover

Published November 7, 2023

Reviews

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

This volume is a tribute to Maria Sol Escobar, better known as Marisol. It was produced by the Buffalo ABK Art Museum to accompany a show of her work. The Buffalo museum, which was the first museum to acquire one of Marisol’s pieces, is the recipient of her estate.

The content is arranged in 9 parts, each with a curator’s commentary. The works are numbered so that, while some page flipping is needed, you can follow the text where each work is defined. Often the work is accompanied by a photo or item that inspired it.

There are 263 images. Those of her work are in color. There are many photos of Marisol: some are portraits, some show her at work, some show her in her work, and others show her with other artists and colleagues.

As you turn the pages you are struck by how unique and imaginative she was. She took a theme and tweaked with a prop, a small new carving, a setting, or paint such that a whole new object was formed, yet her style is such that all her wood work is easily recognized.

She worked not only in wood and bronze, she painted and designed clothing. She created costumes for Martha Graham’s dancers. (There is a photo of her spray painting a gown.)

At the end there is a chronology of her life.

If you are interested in Marisol you will want to see and read this. If your friends are interested in Marisol, you may want this on your coffee table.

[moon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Actually in love with Alex da Corte's piece gosh and Chaffee's intro the way Marisol exists in a hm queercoded way shall I say in the transgressive defiant nature of her art and how she understood so well multiplicities and refractions of the self and the vastness of her work being covered with so much care to see people care about her the way I do... there are parts of each essay that will just swim in my brain... the baby girl/boy future monstrosity we birth we are the monuments and the paradoxical act of erecting a monument but not to idolize but rather capture to capture marisol is so good at capturing the uncapturable or hard to capture with such affinity .. all the writing on nonnormative ways of viewing ... the enmeshment of nature and self and AUGH i need to go revisit this exhibition the orange walls and the music of the general also the photographs in this are stunning oh marisol oh marisol ... to redefine seeing and being and to understand so well ..

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough and eye-opening look at a unique artist and her work!