Marisol Escobar

Marisol Escobar
Marisol Escobar (1963)
Born	(1930-05-22)May 22, 1930 Paris, France
Died	April 30, 2016(2016-04-30) (aged 85) New York, New York, US
Education	Jepson Art Institute École des Beaux-Arts Art Students League of New York Hans Hofmann School
Known for	Sculpture Assemblage
Notable work	Women and Dog The Last Supper Dust Bowl Migrants Father Damien
Movement	New Realism
Awards	1997 Premio Gabriela Mistral, from Organization of American States American Academy of Arts and Letters (1978)

Marisol Escobar (May 22, 1930 – April 30, 2016), otherwise known simply as Marisol, was a French sculptor of Venezuelan heritage who worked in New York City.

Marisol Escobar 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. She concentrated her work on three-dimensional portraits, using inspiration “found in photographs or gleaned from personal memories”.

Her 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) to Los Angeles where she 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. Her father reinforced her interest in art and supported Marisol in her decision to continue along its course. Her mother, Josefina, had been a well known patron of the arts in Venezuela. Marisol studied in Paris in 1949, returning to study in New York in 1950.

During the Postwar period, there was a return of traditional values that reinstated social roles, conforming race and gender within the public sphere. Marisol`s sculptural works toyed with the prescribed social roles and restraints faced by women during this period through her depiction of the complexities of femininity as a perceived truth. Marisol’s practice demonstrated a dynamic combination of folk art, dada, and surrealism – ultimately illustrating a keen psychological insight on contemporary life. By displaying the essential aspects of femininity within an assemblage of makeshift construction, Marisol was able to comment on the social construct of ‘woman’ as an unstable entity. Using an assemblage of plaster casts, wooden blocks, woodcarving, drawings, photography, paint, and pieces of contemporary clothing, Marisol effectively recognized their physical discontinuities. Through a crude combination of materials, Marisol symbolized the artist’s denial of any consistent existence of ‘essential’ femininity. ‘Femininity’ being defined as a fabricated identity made through representational parts. An identity which was most commonly determined by the male onlooker, as either mother, seductress, or partner. Using a feminist technique, Marisol disrupted the patriarchal values of society through forms of mimicry. She imitated and exaggerated the behaviors of the popular public. Through a parody of women, fashion, and television, she attempted to ignite social change.