Please join us at the Hamptons Fine Art Fair, Southampton, July 14-17. Details to follow.
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Lawrence Fine Art is pleased to offer Starry Night, a large, iconic three-dimensional wall painting by pioneering pop artist Marjorie Strider. This diptych is her take on the famous work by Van Gogh.
In her fifty-year career, Strider relished in transgressing conventions and defying viewers’ expectations. Her still lifes are not still at all, but deliciously animated: radishes burst from the bunch, flowers bloom from their Masonite boards, and Coca-Cola fizzes a frothy, pink foam. Her paintings (and their titles) evoke the flat color panels and crisp outlines favored by her hard-edge and Minimalist contemporaries, yet they tackle the Pop artists’ everyday subject matter and tone. As paintings that hang on the wall, they are also sculptures that protrude from it, including carved wood and, later, foam projections.
As a female artist in a field dominated by men, she tackled a subject–the pinup girl–that was synonymous with the objectification of women. The New York Timescalled her “a Pop artist who slyly subverted her male counterparts’ takes on consumerism and the female form. . . ” She was one of few female artists to work in the genre, other examples being Rosalyn Drexler and Marisol. Her work can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Hirshorn, the Albright-Knox, the Newark Museum and others.
Strider was a key member of the 60s avante-garde. She was included in the “The First International Girlie Show” at the Pace Gallery in 1964, along with several soon-to-be stars of the movement, including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselman.
With the introduction of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine in 1954 the pin-up, now rendered as the “centerfold,” increased in social acceptance and exposure. By the early 1960s, the subject fit perfectly with the other types of imagery adopted by Pop artists: brand-name products, consumer items, signs of quintessentially American modern life. Also “associated with the good life in America,” the all-American girl, and the male fantasies that gave rise to her, emerged as one aspect of the American dream.
As a female artist among a movement dominated by men, it was always surprising that Marjorie Strider tackled an unlikely subject of the pin-up girl, a theme that was virtually synonymous with the objectification of women. However, Strider’s work was a study in contradictions as she used pictures of pin-ups in order to overcome what the very pin-ups were causing in the first place. It is this skillful contradiction that generates the humor and pleasure we derive from Marjorie Strider’s art and is what marks its historical importance.
Strider was particular known for her three-dimensional wall paintings in which the subject protrudes or even oozes from the canvas. At a time when the boundaries between the mediums of painting and sculpture were increasingly amplified (most vocally by the critic Clement Greenberg), these works, such as Starry Night, thoughtfully emphasize the “ambiguous zone where painting and sculpture overlap.”
Please contact for details and works available.
