Marisol
Maria Sol Escobar, born 1930, otherwise known simply as Marisol, is a sculptor born in Paris of Venezuelan lineage, working in New York City.
Marisol studied art at the Jepson Art Institute, École des Beaux-Arts, the Art Students League of New York, at the New School for Social Research and she was a student of artist Hans Hofmann. The pop art culture in the 1960s found Marisol as one of its members, enhancing her recognition and popularity. Marisol concentrates her work on three-dimensional portraits, using inspiration “found in photographs or gleaned from personal memories”.
Marisol’s religious beliefs might very well have had a great deal of influence upon her character and tendencies toward the arts. Her father moved Marisol, at age 16, and her brother (Gustavo Escobar) to Los Angeles where Marisol began her study in the arts, after World War II and also their mother’s suicide. She began practice in painting and drawing during her teen years. It was during these years she admitted self-inflicted acts of penance upon herself. She walked on her knees until they bled, kept silent for long periods and tied ropes tightly around her waist in emulation of saints and martyrs.
It was Marisol’s father who reinforced her interest in art and supported Marisol in her decision to continue along its course. Marisol studied in Paris, France in 1949, returning to study in New York in 1950. From 1951 to 1954 she took courses at the New School for Social Research while studying under her most influential mentor, the so-called "dean of Abstract Expressionism", Hans Hofmann. It was in 1951, when Marisol discovered pre-Columbian artifacts, that she decided to give up painting and shift her focus to sculpture. She worked with terracotta and wood. She remained primarily self-taught in sculpture, though she studied one clay course in a New York institution. However, Marisol found herself plagued with self-doubt, left for five years travel abroad to analyze herself and her work. In the 1960s. Marisol began to be influenced by pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. She appeared in two films by Andy Warhol. One of her best-known works from this period is The Party, a life-size group installation of figures at the Toledo Museum of Art. All the figures, gathered together in various guises of the social elite, sported Marisol’s face. It is intriguing to note that Marisol dropped her family surname of Escobar in order to "stand out from the crowd."
Marisol drifted through many movements, though her style has always been unique. In 1966-1967, Marisol completed Hugh Hefner, a sculptural portrait of the celebrity magazine publisher.
