Marjorie Strider

Following a critically-acclaimed solo exhibition in its New York spaces, Galerie Gmurzynska now presents in both its Zurich galleries a broadened retrospective exhibition of the understudied Pop art pioneer, Marjorie Strider (1931-2014), who, according to Artforum, “penetrated Pop with a double-edged sword, as both an art-world insider and a feminist outsider.”

Marjorie Strider defied conventions throughout her career; she challenged not only established painterly conventions of the sacrosanct flatness of painting with her volumetric creations, but also challenged the male dominated art scene in New York of the 1960s and 70s by inverting the male gaze central to the Pop art project.

Strider’s works often featured exaggerated curves and proportions, referencing the idealized female figures found in advertising and popular media of the 1960s. In addition to her painted reliefs, Strider also worked in painting, sculpture, and collage. Her work often explored themes of consumerism, sexuality, and mass media culture.

Galerie Gmurzynska’s presentation on the occasion of the Zurich Art Weekend brings not just her Girlies, but also works from her Foams series into Strider’s conversation with Pop Art and Minimalism, an exchange Strider was central to, along with her peers and friends such as Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Marisol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg.

Her Foam series from the 1970s and 1990s was absolutely groundbreaking as one of the earliest uses of polyurethane plastics in art. Her colorful Foams oozed and flowed out of not only household objects, windows, and appropriated Greek vases, but also, they breached architectural landmarks as Strider intervened on museum and university façades such as for the inaugural exhibition of PS1, New York (1976).

The exhibition will be accompanied by two catalogues: Marjorie Strider: 1931-2014
Marjorie Strider: Foam Lady

“Strider’s lifelong dedication to examining, testing, and breaking the two dimensional surface
and the containing frame led her to make build-outs, use urethane foam and epoxy resin,
and explore themes such as the border and the box, neither of which, in her worldview,
can contain its contents. Movement, change, and multiple viewpoints are central to Strider’s work throughout her career.”

JOHN YAU, “INDEPENDENT SPIRIT,” 2011

PRESS REVIEWS

of “Marjorie Strider: Girls, girls, girls,” Galerie Gmurzynska, New York 2022-2023

“With her appropriations of advertising imagery executed in a garish, high-key palette, she penetrated Pop with a double-edged sword, as both an art-world insider and a feminist outsider. This is perhaps the main reason why it has taken so long for Strider’s oeuvre to be given the retrospective treatment—but the moment finally arrived with this outing at New York’s Galerie Gmurzynska, which featured twenty-odd paintings made between 1963 and 2014.”

ARTFORUM

March 2023

“The title of [Galerie Gmurzynska’s] Pop artist’s show—the carnival-barker solicitation “Girls, girls, girls!”—captures her signature combination of blunt seduction and caricature. In the early nineteen-sixties, Strider, who died in 2014, moved from Kansas to New York City, where she took on the figure of the pinup, advertising’s quintessential bait, with a serrated humor and a spatial aggression absent from the work of her male contemporaries, Roy Lichtenstein et al. In this ... survey, a selection of blaring, career-spanning canvases express her enduring dissatisfaction with the limits of painting’s traditional surface.”

THE NEW YORKER

January 2023

“The exhibition, on view at Galerie Gmurzynska in New York through January, reinvigorates Strider’s oeuvre and re-imagines her role in art history as a leading Pop Artist
who was omitted from the male-dominated canon.”

FORBES MAGAZINE

November 2022

“Marjorie Strider: Girls, girls, girls,” at Galerie Gmurzynska on New York’s Upper East Side, is a blast. It is also, at least partially, a blast from the past. The solo retrospective, open until the end of this month, is a medley of work produced by the Pop Artist that spans from 1963 until her death in 2014. Strider reject- ed the minimalism pursued by the contemporary art cool kids. Instead, the Oklahoman went big,

bright, and exuberant.”

THE SUN

January 2023

“I’m basically a sculptor, interested in perception. My and other people’s perception of space.
I began my artistic life as a painter, became dissatisfied with the flat plane of the canvas and started building out into the room.”

MARJORIE STRIDER, 1976