Word: marisol
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Push-&-Pull. Born in Paris of Venezuelan parents, Marisol is a black-haired, wide-eyed, unmarried woman of 33 who speaks in monosyllabic whispers so faint that by comparison Jackie Kennedy would sound like a cheerleader. She works in wood-logs, barrels and planks that she saws apart and nails together. At times her figures seem to be little more than crude painted cutouts; but their oddball incompleteness and the way painted surfaces suddenly and spontaneously emerge into sculpted forms are meticulously planned. Three dimensions sink into two; two grow into three in a sort of Marisol version of Hans...
...Marisol Escobar-or Marisol, as she is known professionally-studied under the noted abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, and, she says dryly, "I painted like a Hofmann student." But though she learned much from her master, he was quickly supplanted by a series of happenstance influences that sent Marisol off on a strange and appealing tangent of her own. In a friend's house, for instance, she saw some small Mexican boxes filled with hand-carved painted figures, and she was enchanted. In another house, she was drawn to an old-fashioned coffee grinder that had the shape...
...Marisol began making boxes filled with small figures; then she constructed some people, starting out with old hat forms. Today she is famous- sought after by collectors and currently featured in a group show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. That sort of accolade can mean much or little these days, but in Marisol's case, the applause is for more than mere novelty...
Some critics have seen in Marisol' sculptures the work of a satirist, but whatever social comment may be inferred is almost always accidental. "I'm thinking only about art and shapes," say Marisol. "If there is social comment, it seems to come out by itself." A sculpture called The Generals, in which two officers, who vaguely resemble Napoleonic marshals, sit astride the same horse, did not start out as a poke at the military. Marisol, it seems, was doing a sculpture of a friend, using a barrel for the torso, when she realized that if she tipped...