Artist Biography
Marisol Escobar is a Parisian-born Venezuelan who has lived in New York since the 1950s. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1949 and at both the New School for Social Research and the Hans Hofmann School from 1951 to 1954. Marisol's carved and painted sculpture became associated in the early 1960s with Pop Art, although her sculpture has little to do with the notions about mass production and signage for which Pop is famous. Instead, her work satirically commented on contemporary social and political attitudes and depicted subjects ranging from socialites, celebrities, and political figures to a migrant dust bowl family in search of work. After several years abroad, Marisol returned to the United States in the early 1970s and concentrated on beautifully crafted mahogany sculpture of sharks, barracudas, and other forms of marine life all bearing the image of the artist's face. In recent years, in mixed media assemblages, Marisol has portrayed such creative legends as Georgia O'Keeffe and Martha Graham and has also imaginatively adapted imagery from Old Master paintings.
Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)
