The Many Faces of Marisol

Marisol 1930-2016, France Follow +

Marisol was born in Paris in 1930 to wealthy, well-travelled Venezuelan parents, and spent her youth in Caracas, New York, and Los Angeles. She emerged as a voice in the American Pop art scene in the 1960s, and counted Andy Warhol as a collaborator and friend. Grappling with weighty subjects such as feminism, environmentalism, and social issues, Marisol distinguished herself through wit and dark satire and became particularly known for large totemic assemblages influenced by Pre-Columbian art.

Organised by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the travelling retrospective draws from a substantial number of artworks bequeathed to the museum upon her death in 2016. The Montreal edition (7 October 2023–21 January 2024) is curated by Mary-Dailey Desmarais and structured across five sections, arranged both thematically and chronologically to affirm the artist as an often-overlooked yet singular figure within the Pop art pantheon.

Works include Marisol’s early drawings and sculptures of the 1950s and 1960s, where she experimented with wood relief, plaster casting, and stone; large-scale portrait assemblages, some of which feature public and historical figures like Georgia O’Keeffe and Washington Roebling; ocean-themed sculptures informed by her experiences of scuba diving; and late-career figurative drawings and body casts.

Throughout her life, Marisol drew from her personal experiences to push back on the expectations of her gender. Among the standout works is Six Women (1965), a large, abstracted sculpture of three pairs of figures conjoined within black formica boxes. Of the women, four have faces inlaid in wood taken from casts of the artist’s own face. Marisol’s face again appears in The Party (1965–66), a sprawling 15-piece assemblage comprising life-sized wooden figures dressed in clothes and accoutrements of the time. Their sentinel-like positions are suggestive of the awkward, self-absorbed social gatherings the artist experienced but detested.

Marisol was often asked by journalists when she planned to marry and have children, and she seems to have responded with Baby Girl (1963), a rudimentary wooden baby adorned with a miniature toy doll with the artist’s face. But Marisol did not only confront preconceptions of gender in her work. She also masterfully challenged precepts of sculptural form by referencing the Pre-Columbian sculpture and American folk art in her compositions, utilising a dizzying array of media—including wood, clothing, shoes, and images from newspapers and magazines—to do so. These fragmentary and figurative assemblages, which often include casts of the artist’s body parts, are both three and two-dimensional, causing the viewer to shift perspective and constantly engage in a spatial relationship with each block form.

In the wood assemblage Women and Dog (1963–64), for example, three totemic female figures stand with a dog, whose wooden body hosts a taxidermy head, and a small child with a visage based on Marisol’s at that age. Two of the women feature plaster-cast faces based on the artist’s that are replicated many times over like a many-faced god, while the one that stands between them contains a photographic portrait of Marisol at the centre of a wooden oval disc that stands in for a head. With their boxy compositions, indifferent expressions, and formal dress style, Marisol’s critique of the social strictures applied to women during her lifetime visibly resonate within these forms. By integrating her own image into the work, she also seemed to acknowledge her own complicity in their perpetuation. —[O]

Marisol: A Retrospective is on view at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from 7 October 2023 to 21 January 2024. It will tour to Toledo Museum of Art from March to June 2024; Buffalo AKG Art Museum from July 2024 to January 2025; and Dallas Museum of Art from February to July 2025.

Main image: Marisol, Women and Dog (1963–64). Collection Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchased with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 64.17a-i. © Estate of Marisol/Artists Rights Society, New York. Digital image: © Whitney Museum/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY.