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Centro Botín Champions Marisol’s Drawings and Rethinks Her Legacy

In a career-spanning exhibition, the oft-overlooked artist’s works on paper are given pride of place.

Centro Botín, an arts hub in Cantabria designed by Renzo Piano, with seaside views from the stilted structure’s corridors and platforms, has been spotlighting drawing practices since 2006. The current show, “Marisol: When Things Are Just Beginning” is the first dedicated retrospective of the Venezuelan-American artist’s drawings, featuring some 120 works spanning from 1949 to just before her death in 2016.

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According to Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Centro Botín’s director of exhibitions, the Spanish institution privileges “researching, presenting, and cataloguing the drawings of artists for whom drawing is fundamental to the practice—not a sketch, but a superior work—actually part of their positioning and thinking and expressing.” The Marisol show in particular foregrounds drawing as a medium by which the artist expressed both her colorful curiosity and looming anxieties. It is construed as a sampling from within her lifetime’s output; there are sketches for costumes she made for a Martha Graham performance in 1975 and outlines of her hand used to create silhouettes in the ’60s and offhanded doodles on envelopes from the 2000s. In the exhibition catalogue, curator Laura Vallés Vílchez writes of the drawings that “they are neither preparatory nor confessional, nor can they be considered marginal.”

MoMA lent two works on paper, and most of the works come from American collections. The drawing selection is custom-framed for the show and presented alongside a sprinkling of sculptures, which the catalogue qualifies as “carved and assembled wooden figures, often painted, incorporating found objects, plaster casts of [Marisol’s] own face and hands, and direct references to mass culture… hieratic figures that oscillate between caricature and idol.” There are also archival materials and several Warhol short films in which Marisol starred.

In fact, the exhibition opens with a 16mm Warhol-made film of Marisol, Women and Dog (1963-64), part of the Whitney’s collection, in which the artist stands stock-still adjacent to three shoulder-to-shoulder blocky female forms, as though an annex........

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