Marisol

Venezuelan, French, American, 1930 - 2016

Biography(b Paris, 22 May 1930).
Venezuelan-American sculptor of French birth. Because of her use of everyday objects she is often classified as a Pop artist, but this designation does not adequately describe the complexity and compassion of her sculpture.

Marisol was born in Paris and had a peripatetic childhood before attending high school in Los Angeles. In 1949 she left for Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; in 1950 she returned to New York and studied at the Art Students League, followed by three years studying with Hans Hofmann. Her arrival in New York coincided with the transition between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art and Marisol soon became a significant persona in the heady social and aesthetic swirl that marked the period.

In the early 1950s, Marisol discovered Pre-Columbian art and shifted from painting to sculpture. Influenced by the Neo-Dada lead up to Pop art, especially the work of Robert Rauschenberg, she began experimenting with assemblage and soon developed her signature work: large-scale figures using a combination of found and created forms. Typically, she began with richly grained wooden blocks, then drew or painted illusionistic faces and body elements on them—or used plaster masks—adding found objects as props and to suggest environments, often with a twist of Surrealist disjunction. The Family (1962; New York, MOMA), an early tableau depicting a dustbowl farm family, also introduced her life-long interest in social themes. Quite different in tone, The Cocktail Party (1965; Toledo, OH, Mus. A.) was an elaborate 15-figure installation that called attention to the situation of women in modern society by satirizing a familiar social cliché. Whether sombre or witty, however, Marisol’s themes and their multi-layered presentations were always intelligent, a bit quirky, and masterfully executed. Her hands-on technique and emotional connection to the subjects were in stark contrast to the detachment generally ascribed to Pop artists. Her relationship to contemporary culture was also distinctive. Marisol did not simply respond to its imagery; through her figures she probed for insight into its effect on human nature.

Insight and empathy continued to characterize her later work from reprises of family groups to homages to personal heroes—Picasso, Magritte, de Kooning, and Bishop Desmond Tutu. [Deborah F. Pokinski. "Marisol." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T054435.]

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