Thousands queued for her shows. Her obituary called her forgotten.

Art weekend in Zurich this week, we walk around galleries in search of something outstanding. And then, what a thing to walk into: a mix of folk-carving directness and deadpan sophistication that I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else before. It’s work by Marisol at Kunsthaus Zürich. Absolute revelation.

Marisol Escobar (1930–2016), Venezuelan-American, big in the New York pop years and then mostly written out of the story. How did that happen?

In the mid-1960s she was the most celebrated woman artist of her generation, thousands queuing for her shows. But the press fetishized the person, not the work. Warhol called her “the first girl artist with glamour,” the magazines ran with “the Latin Garbo,” for her exoticism, legendary beauty and famed silences.

And here is the thing: the crowds were already looking past the sculptures while she was at her most celebrated. They came for the face and the mystique, so when she withdrew in the late 1960s and the work turned darker, there was nothing holding her in memory. The persona left and took her with it. Her 2016 Guardian obituary called her “the forgotten star of pop art.”

I stood in front of the work and it blew me away.