Marisol: Destabilizing Doubles and the Erotics of Sameness — with Cathleen Chaffee

As Minimalist sculptors in the 1960s encoded their references to the human form in an abstract language, Marisol (Venezuelan and American, born France, 1930–2016) used figurative Pop sculpture to treat with absurdity or skepticism the stability of signs by which people are seen as gendered. At the same time, her drawings of the 1960s and 1970s manifested wide-ranging and nonconforming body forms and gender expressions. Through an examination of works featuring in the upcoming exhibition and catalogue Marisol: A Retrospective, this talk contextualizes the artist’s disruptive approach to the figuration of subjectivity, sexuality, and gender.  Cathleen Chaffee is Charles Balbach Chief Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, where she has organized exhibitions with artists including  Christine Sun Kim, Eric N. Mack, Jacob Kassay, Tamar Guimarães, Anthony McCall, Erin Shirreff, Joe Bradley, and Ellie Ga, as well as historical and thematic projects including Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective; Shade: Clyfford Still/Mark Bradford; Looking at Tomorrow: Light and Language from The Panza Collection, 1967–1990; and Overtime: The Art of Work. She co-organized Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings, a collateral event at the 59th Venice Biennale. Chaffee previously held curatorial positions at the Yale University Art Gallery; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Chaffee holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She is currently preparing traveling retrospectives dedicated to Stanley Whitney (opening at the Buffalo AKG in Spring 2024) and Marisol: A Retrospective, opening at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in October 2023.