Marisol Escobar’s Self Portrait: Existence in Modernity

In late 2023, the largest retrospective of the artist Marisol began its journey at the first of four museums. Marisol (full name: Marisol Escobar) was a French-born Venezuelan artist who is associated with the Pop movement and best known for her larger-than-life wooden sculptures. 

Marisol: A Retrospective is an expansive exploration of Marisol’s artistic eras: her earliest works in sculpture, her height of Pop sculpture, 2-D color pencil drawings, ocean inspired art, costume creation for dance companies, anticolonial solidarity and public monuments. 

In his accompanying essay “You Will Not Catch Me Alive,” artist Alex Da Corte writes: “Two faces have I, one to laugh and one to cry. And for Marisol Escobar, through closed eyes and mouths cast in plaster, one to scream and one to shout and one to pierce the night.” 

Corte’s words are apt: Marisol’s works pierce, present in my mind long after I left the museum. One thing that struck me throughout Marisol: A Retrospective was how sees. Marisol seemed to see in a way that cut right down to the core of an object or action, and she manages to recreate that perspective so transformatively. Perhaps part of this is how sculpture works in general.