“I got tired of being a nobody... So I began to work very hard.”

Although largely forgotten in recent decades, artist Marisol Escobar’s public persona and creative output made a serious splash in the New York art world in the 1960s.

Operating on her own terms in a male-dominated scene, the French sculptor was “known for blithely shattering boundaries,” as her obituary in The New York Times declared earlier this year. For one, Escobar maintained privacy in an age when the public thirsted for celebrity. She was described as “Garboesque” for her discretion: that is to say, on par with the famously reclusive habits of the Swedish-born actress. Escobar confounded others with her often-silent presence, but ultimately her shape-shifting ability was key to her success. “She can look like the stunning marquesa of a Fellini movie—or a beatnik kid on her way to a pot party,” a contemporary once remarked of her.

Escobar’s work addressed topics like kinship and womanhood with tongue in cheek, highlighting their inherent discomforts and absurdities. In Love (1962), an incomplete plaster face—nose to chin—is seen gulping back a glass bottle of Coca-Cola in an unnervingly evocative way. The Family (1962), painted on wooden planks, portrays a woman and her four children as little more than an awkwardly gathered group.

Escobar frequented the studio of Andy Warhol during the 1960s, and appeared in two of his experimental black-and-white films: Kiss (in which various couples kiss for three and a half minutes apiece; Escobar was paired with painter Harold Stevenson) and 13 Most Beautiful Women (a compilation pulled from Warhol’s wider series of screen tests).

In a 1965 New York Times Magazine profile—perhaps the most revealing press peek into her life—cultural reporter Grace Glueck showed Escobar to be self-assured and self-reliant. She transcended the insularity of underground film and art and attracted, as Glueck put it, “curiosity-seekers” to her exhibitions. “In this new American era of artist-as-star, she is asked to lecture by ladies’ groups, gets letters from yearning teenagers and is recognized by businessmen in nightclubs,” Glueck remarked.

Yet Escobar resisted the fame she garnered and often bolted from New York for several years at a time in favor of escapist travel. The scene shifted in her absence and she became less integral to it, inching further and further toward its fringes. Her more insinuating works of the 1960s would transform into blunt ferocity during the 1970s, evidenced by such titles as I Hate You Creep and Your Fetus (1973) and Lick the Tire of My Bicycle (1974).

When others accused Escobar of narcissism for her recurrent practice of integrating herself into her work, she countered: “The truth is, I use my own face because it’s easier. When I want to make a face or hands for one of my pieces, I’m usually the only person around to use as a model.” Her incorporation of her own anatomy was pragmatic, but also emphasized genuine ownership. Escobar noted, on carving her own path: “I don’t feel you have to belong to a little group and then say everything not part of it is bad.” Her career was hers, and she took it by the reins: “It has happened because I have made it happen,” she said of being a professional artist. “I got tired of being a nobody… So I began to work very hard.”

María Sol Escobar was born in Paris in 1930 to an affluent Venezuelan family. Her father was in real estate; her mother was an artist who committed suicide when Escobar was 11. Escobar grew up between Paris and Caracas until her family moved to Los Angeles in 1946. She returned to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, but it was a bad fit: “They wanted you to paint like Bonnard,” she scoffed during the interview with Glueck. She signed up for courses at the Art Students League of New York instead, followed by classes at the New School for Social Research.

During this period, Escobar mingled regularly at the Cedar Tavern, which was then the Manhattan go-to for many abstract expressionists. She became friendly with several of them, notably Dutch-American action painter Willem de Kooning.

She rechristened herself Marisol when she began showing her work in New York in the late 1950s. Her first major solo exhibition was at the Leo Castelli Gallery—“the international epicenter for Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual Art”—in 1958. The year prior, she had been part of a pioneering group show alongside Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and her work had already been shown at the Museum of Modern Art. Escobar’s pop art sensibility merged with references to pre-Columbian artifacts; she constructed tableaux from assemblages of wood, plaster, terra cotta, textiles and found objects.“I do my research in the Yellow Pages,” she told Glueck. “You could call them a new palette for me.”

Humor, politics and pop culture were her principal thematic threads. The Party—an installation of blocky painted-and carved-wood figures ornamented with clothes, shoes and glasses—underlined both the artist’s social malaise and the superficiality of the art scene. All of the 15 figures sported Escobar’s visage, and none of them interacted with each other. Escobar’s sculpture-portrait of Hugh Hefner, in which he is both smoking and holding a pipe, was featured on the March 3, 1967, cover of Time magazine (“The Pursuit of Hedonism,” its banner blared). Like several of the identifiable figures she depicted, Hefner was as flattened as the lifestyle he represented.

A renewed interest in Escobar’s work only came about in the waning years of her life: A 2014 solo show at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee traveled to El Museo del Barrio in New York City. Her work resonates as authoritatively today as it ever did. The misrepresentation of women, the traumas of family, the hollowness of celebrity, the spectacle of the art industry: Escobar understood and articulated the shortcomings of the modern era.