Deeply strange, and deeply sympathetic: Marisol

Venezuelan-American sculptor Marisol was well known among the early-1960s Pop artists before turning from the limelight in the late 1960s, when she began to experiment with political and environmental themes. In 1968, she participated in the Venice Biennale and then Documenta, where she was one of just four women among the 149 exhibiting artists. “Despite her success, she grew frustrated with the brutal police response to Vietnam War protests in the United States and spent much of the second half of 1968 traveling in India, Nepal, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand,” Cathleen Chaffee writes in the new Louisiana Museum of Modern Art exhibition catalog. “In 1969, she intensively trained to scuba dive in Tahiti. In new works made after these experiences, she explored human-animal interdependence as well as connections between the American military-industrial complex and the life of the oceans. These sculptures include her chimeralike The Fishman (1973, shown here) and sculptures of barracuda and needlefish, which she connected to missiles and other modern forms of weaponry. As she later told an interviewer, ‘I have always had a special communication with the world of animals. I wish humans were like that.’ In seeking to understand the life of underwater creatures through her remarkable sculptures, Marisol combined aspects of the evolutionary mimicry so common in the animal kingdom with a deeply sympathetic human approach. One of the most direct ways to understand another is to try to see from their perspective and feel what it is like to be them: to ‘walk in their shoes,’ swim in their water. In casts she appended to these deeply strange aquatic sculptures, Marisol studiously puckered and contorted her face to appear like the fish with which she was absorbed.”

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Published by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2026

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Published to accompany the traveling survey currently on view at ICA Boston, An Indigenous Present, co-published with BIG NDN Press, is a monumental gathering of more than 60 contemporary artists, photographers, musicians, writers and more, showcasing diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms and mediums. Forthcoming staff favorites include the exhibition catalog Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings, co-published with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the photography monograph Melissa Auf der Maur: My ’90s Rock Photographs, co-published with Art Gallery of Ontario.

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