Marisol Escobar was the enigmatic queen of the 1960s New York art scene, a woman who often outshone Warhol before retreating into the shadows. This retrospective at Centro Botín shifts the spotlight from her famous wooden figures to her lifelong drawing practice, revealing a vulnerable, obsessive search for identity through sketches of hands, masks, and self-portraits. It is a rare look at an artist who used her own face to question the very nature of fame and public image.

You're watching a dialogue between mass and line. Standing in the Renzo Piano-designed galleries, you see the heavy, blocky presence of wooden sculptures like Triumph set against the delicate, sometimes frantic pencil strokes of her notebooks. The light from the Bay of Santander floods the room, making the grain of the wood and the grain of the paper feel equally tactile and alive.