Marisol
A Retrospective

In the mid-1960s Marisol was lauded as the female artist of her generation and was proclaimed to be ‘the Latin Garbo’ for her apparent exoticism, legendary beauty & famed silences. While celebrating her satirical and deceptively political sculptures & self-portraits that helped define the 1960s, the book’s essays also examine her works that allude to environmental precarity, engage with the immigrant experience, figure postcolonial disenfranchisement and destabilise sexual and gender norms. 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 catalogue, 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. 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-colour reproductions of her works, a robust bibliography, an exhibition history and an illustrated chronology.

Marisol (1930–2016) was born María 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.

Published by DelMonico Books/Buffalo AKG Art Museum in 2023
ISBN 9781636811017
Hardback
272 pages
29.2 x 20.3 cm