Her work hasn&#39t been exhibited in New York for fifteen years, but pop-artist Marjorie Strider has finally returned to Hollis Taggart Galleries where her much anticipated show opened on March 8th. Her art, happily, remains as we remember it. Bikini-clad women, painted in flat blocks of acrylic paint, playfully engage their audience. And these ladies have real &#39depth&#39 to them: in some pieces, the more desirous parts of their bodies physically project out from the canvas. Next to one such relief of a woman&#39s breasts, Come Hither from 1963, hangs the notice: DO NOT TOUCH. It is the only such injunction in the gallery, making Strider&#39s reference hard to miss. In 1947, Marcel Duchamp co-authored a naked and solitary rubber breast, calling it Priere de Toucher or Please Touch. Strider&#39s breasts are markedly different. Firstly, there are two of them. Then, they are clothed. In relief, it also looks as though they have felt the effects of gravity. And, they are truly monstrous in size. Strider&#39s breasts have the strength of a contemporary and distinctly female artist&#151an artist who was not afraid to grow intimate with the male-dominated line of inheritance drawn from the early avant-garde, only to grow past it.

Needless to say, Duchamp&#39s name should come up quite often where Strider&#39s work is involved as she appears to draw much of her own conceptual vision from the world&#39s original conceptual artist. For instance, Duchamp&#39s seminal Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912) also finds mention on Hollis Taggart&#39s walls: Strider re-imagines its content for her own portrayal of a near-nude woman stepping down the stairs in her aptly titled, Descending (2010). Where it is obscured in Duchamp, the female form in Strider&#39s piece is recognizable, blunt, and transparent. The woman is quite actually stripped bare and made wholly visible. Strider doesn&#39t seem to have the patience for Cubism&#39s disruptive plurality of perspectives. Descending possesses a different kind of mobility: the hyper-sexual woman descends upon her gallery with all the force of a candid act. There is only one perspective here, and Strider renders it inescapable. We have to leave wondering if maybe viewership can really be so much simpler than, at least as women, we want to imagine it to be.