María Sol Escobar, known as Marisol Escobar, was a sculptor born in Paris in 1930 and who died in New York in 2016. The daughter of Venezuelan parents, she held French, Venezuelan and American nationality. She is associated with Pop Art, making satirical sculptures drawn from everyday life that were shown in galleries, fairs and museums, including MoMA and the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, and at the Venice Biennale.
Marisol spent her childhood between France, Venezuela and Los Angeles. When she was eleven, her mother, Josefina, took her own life, an event that is said to have shaped her reserved character and the restraint of her work. She received artistic training from an early age at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and, later in New York, at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research. There she met artists such as Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Roy Lichtenstein, who supported her early career.
In 1962 she met Andy Warhol at a dinner hosted by Frank Stella. She appears in two Warhol films, Kiss and Thirteen Most Beautiful Women. From this period comes The Party, a group of life-size silhouettes installed at the Sidney Janis Gallery, in which the figures chat in various poses. Marisol moved through several artistic movements, yet her style always remained distinctive. She often included faces of public figures, relatives and friends; in her exhibition The Kennedys she questioned the image of the family, which she described as more important than life itself. She also addressed human suffering in works such as Dust Bowl Migrants and Father Damien, the latter displayed at the entrance to the Hawaii State Capitol and in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the United States Capitol.
In 1968 she represented Venezuela at the Venice Biennale. Her legacy endures in the retrospectives devoted to her in recent years, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami show in 2022 and the Centro Botín exhibition in Santander, which will feature her first drawing retrospective in 2026.