Marisol, the queen of 'pop art' who fled

The artist Marisol Escobar (Paris, 1930-New York, 2016), known simply as Marisol, welcomes the public to the exhibition dedicated to her at the Centro Botín in Santander until October 25th from an Andy Warhol film, who said of her that she was the first artist "with glamour." In this film, Marisol appears motionless for a few minutes next to her sculpture Women and Dog (1963-1964), currently owned by the Whitney Museum, as if she were just another wooden figure. This film serves to remember that Marisol triumphed on the New York scene even before Warhol, and that she was defined as "the queen of pop art".

The sculptures and drawings, between introspection and the absurd and social and gender criticism, appeared in prominent newspapers and magazines including Life, Glamour and The New York Times, and could be seen at important artistic events such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta IV (1968), where she was one of the four women who exhibited there.

But for Marisol, becoming a public figure was overwhelming, and she broke with the rules of the art world. The title of the exhibition, Marisol: when everything is about to begin, is taken from a letter sent to her by gallerist Leo Castelli when she decided to "escape" to Rome after the success of her first solo exhibition. "How can you leave, when everything is about to begin?", Castelli told her. Later, when the barbarity of the Vietnam War became increasingly visible, in 1968 she left the art world again, at the moment when she had the most visibility, to travel to Southeast Asia.

Furthermore, Marisol rejected the label of "Latin beauty" with which she was presented in the media, and used her own face in a sculpture, Indian, created in solidarity with Native Americans, whose image tobacco companies used in totems they placed in front of tobacco shops. "It is a sculpture that today can be problematic due to issues related to the colonial question and appropriationism, but which is crossed by the very experience as a racialized woman, immigrant and represented in the media as a Latin beauty," says Laura Vallés, curator of the exhibition at the Centro Botín. "The crises and policies of representation, and how to get out of them, from their watertight compartments, is perhaps what best defines Marisol's work," she adds.

Marisol was born in Paris in 1930 into a Venezuelan family that, later on, was devastated by her mother's suicide. She was raised between Caracas, Los Angeles, and New York. "Geographic displacements define a very particular way of life and also a very elusive character," says Vallés. Marisol was eleven years old when her mother committed suicide, and she practically stopped speaking for five years. Precisely, one of the exhibited pieces commemorates her mother, a sculpture titled Mom and I, which she always kept with her. "In some way, this grieving process accompanied her throughout her entire career," the curator points out.

Marisol achieved international fame for her sculptures, but drawing was a constant practice, even when she suffered the ravages of Alzheimer's at the end of her life. In many of her drawings, one can see faces, masks, and body fragments: hands, mouths... Among the most innovative, there are some in which the gender and sex of the characters are indefinable, also in the self-portraits.

Bodies in dispute

The exhibition includes more than a hundred works, including drawings, sculptures, and engravings. In the drawings from the 70s, after travels through Southeast Asia and Polynesia, the bodies are "more acidic and in dispute". In one of them, the text can be read: "The only salvation for an American is to be queer". Another of the great trips was to Tahiti, where she learned to dive and made underwater films and drawings with which she imagined a coexistence between man and nature. In one of the drawings in this area, you can see the aquabell, an artifact invented by herself to be able to live with the fish at the bottom of the oceans. One of the most outstanding works from this moment that can be seen in the exhibition is another sculpture, Triggerfish, a large triggerfish with its face with its mouth open. "We return to the idea of a mask –says Vallès–. She used some of the darkest and most violent fish to make references to missiles, in the context of the Cold War, and the technological advances that took place at that time".

The last room is the most delicate of the tour. Vallés took on the "ethical challenge" of showing the drawings of a Marisol suffering from Alzheimer's in the last decade of her life, among which is a portrait of her caregiver. The fact that the disease altered her memory and language did not prevent Marisol, who did not lose "the memory of the hand," from continuing to draw. "It seems beautiful to point out that Marisol was fortunate enough to be able to spend the entire illness in her home, in her own studio. The drawings from this moment are works that respond to the same inertia and the artist's own life living with the disease, but at the same time letting the hand move in the drawing," says Vallès.