FROM 9 OCT '26 to 29 MAR '27 | Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen brings Venezuelan-American pop art icon Marisol back to Rotterdam from 9 October 2026 to 29 March 2027 with a major retrospective at the Depot. More than 80 international loans join works from the museum's own collection in an exhibition spanning her colourful wooden figures, mysterious underwater creatures and intimate drawings.
Image: Marisol, The Car (De auto), 1964. Collection Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
Back in Rotterdam after 58 years
There is a particular Rotterdam connection behind this exhibition. Marisol first presented a solo exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in 1968, after her work had been shown at the Venice Biennale. Almost six decades later, the museum is returning to an artist who became one of the most recognisable figures associated with pop art in the 1960s before gradually disappearing from the wider public conversation.
Born in 1930 and active in New York, Marisol became known for large sculptural groups built from wood and combined with paint, photographs, plaster, found objects and casts of the human body. She was part of the same cultural world as Andy Warhol, appeared in international magazines and developed a visual language that could look playful while carrying considerably sharper ideas underneath.
The Rotterdam retrospective spreads across Galleries I, II and III on the third, fourth and fifth floors of the Depot.
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Her own face became part of the work
Marisol repeatedly used herself as material. Her face appears throughout her sculptures, sometimes drawn, photographed or reproduced as a three-dimensional mask, allowing her to test different identities and ideas about how women are seen.
The museum describes her as her own favourite model. That makes the work feel personal, but the subject quickly expands beyond self-portraiture. Her sculptures question social expectations, femininity, family roles and cultural conventions, often using humour to make the criticism land more quietly.
She also incorporated casts of her own body into her work. In some sculptures, the physical presence of a real face or hand sits alongside roughly shaped blocks of wood, deliberately unsettling the boundary between a person, an image and an object.
The Car puts several Marisols on the road
One of the works connecting Marisol directly to Boijmans is The Car (1964), acquired by the museum in 1972 and now regarded as a collection favourite.
The sculpture turns an automobile and its passengers into a strange group portrait. Faces appear as drawings, photographs and plaster masks, while hands are either outlined or cast from live models. Look closely and almost every passenger in the vehicle turns out to be Marisol herself.
That repetition turns an apparently humorous scene into something more psychological. The work asks who we are in relation to other people, how we present ourselves and how many versions of one person can exist at the same time.
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More than 80 international loans
The retrospective brings more than 80 international loans to Rotterdam, placing familiar wooden figure groups alongside drawings and less expected works involving underwater forms.
Behind their bright surfaces and humour, the works repeatedly address subjects that still feel contemporary: the position of women, social norms and humanity's relationship with the environment. The exhibition therefore makes a case not simply for remembering Marisol as a pop art celebrity, but for looking again at what she was actually saying.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Kunsthaus Zürich and Museum der Moderne Salzburg, and is made possible by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Visiting the Marisol exhibition
Marisol runs from 9 October 2026 through 29 March 2027 at Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen. The Depot is open Tuesday to Sunday from 11:00 to 17:00.
A €2.50 exhibition surcharge applies during the run of Marisol. The surcharge does not apply to visitors aged 18 and under, Friends of Boijmans, Rotterdampas holders and several other pass holders and professional groups listed by the museum.
Families can also visit a special Family Day on Thursday 22 October, with activities around the Depot and the exhibition.
Tickets and current visitor information are available through
How to get there
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen is located at Museumpark 24. Metro lines A, B and C stop at Eendrachtsplein, around 350 metres from the Depot, while tram 7 stops at Museumpark, around 290 metres away.
If you are driving, Museumpark car park is next to the Depot, although the museum warns that capacity can be limited during construction work in the area.
