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Judith Linhares (born 1940) is an American painter, known for her vibrant, expressive figurative and narrative paintings.Pagel, David. Judith Linhares: Divine Intoxication, Orange, CA: Chapman University, 2006.Smith, Roberta. "As Chelsea Expands, a Host of Visions Rush In," The New York Times, June 1, 2001. Retrieved October 24, 2018.Johnson, Ken. "Judith Linhares," The New York Times, April 14, 2006. Retrieved October 24, 2018. She came of age and gained recognition in the Bay Area culture of the 1960s and 1970s and has been based in New York City since 1980.Adam, Brooks. "The Labyrinth of Judith Linhares," Dangerous Pleasures: The Art of Judith Linhares, Survey catalogue essay, Sonoma, CA: Sonoma State University Art Gallery, 1994, p. 7–30.Saltz, Jerry. "Judith Linhares," The Village Voice, April 5–11, 2006, p. 73.Linhares, Philip. Adeline Kent Award 1975, Essay, San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Art Institute, 1976. Curator Marcia Tucker featured her in the influential New Museum show, "Bad Painting" (1978), and in the 1984 Venice Biennale show, "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained: American Visions of the New Decade."Tucker, Marcia. 'Bad' Painting, Catalogue, New York: The New Museum, 1978. Retrieved October 24, 2018.The New Museum. "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained: American Visions of the New Decade," Organized by Lynn Gumpert, Ned Rifkin, and Marcia Tucker. Exhibitions. Retrieved October 31, 2018. Linhares synthesizes influences including Expressionism, Bay Area Figuration, Mexican art and second-wave feminism, in work that flirts with abstraction and balances visionary personal imagery, expressive intensity, and pictorial rigor.Cameron, Dan. "Judith Linhares Weaves a Spell," Arts Magazine, Vol. 60, No. 4, December 1985, p. 76-9.Berwick, Carly. "Judith Linhares", ARTnews, Summer 2006, p. 181.Egan, Shannon. "A Venus of Wild Nights: The Female Nude in Paintings of Judith Linhares," The Gettysburg Review, Autumn 2009, Vol. #22, #3, p. 413–416.Bell, Madison Smartt. "Judith Linhares by Madison Smart Bell", BOMB Magazine, Fall 2006, p. 78-85. Retrieved October 24, 2018. Art historian Whitney Chadwick wrote, "Linhares is an artist for whom painting has always mattered as the surest path of synthesizing experience and interior life," her works "emerging as if by magic from an alchemical stew of vivid complementary hues and muted tonalities."Chadwick, Whitney. Sweet Talk, Catalogue essay, New York: Edward Thorp Gallery, 2001. Critic John Yau describes her paintings "funny, strange, and disconcerting,"Yau, John. "Judtih Linhares, "Riptide," The Brooklyn Rail, March 4, 2011. Retrieved October 31, 2018. while writer Susan Morgan called them "unexpected and indelible" images exploring "an oddly sublime territory where exuberant bliss remains inseparable from ominous danger."Morgan, Susan. "Judith Linhares," Catalogue essay, Flora and Fauna, New Berlin, NY: Sam & Adele Golden Gallery, 2015.
Linhares has been recognized with more than forty-five one-person exhibitions, major awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters "American Academy of Arts and Letters Announces 2008 Art Awards," Artforum, March 18, 2008. Retrieved October 24, 2018. and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation,John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Judith Linhares". Fellows. Retrieved October 12, 2018. among many, and acquisitions by numerous public collections.Edward Thorp Gallery. Judith Linhares: Riptide, Catalogue, New York: Edward Thorp Gallery, 2011. Critics, such as The New York Times' Ken Johnson identify her as a key forerunner to and influence on several waves of younger figurative artists.Brody, David. "Hippie Edenists Adrift: Judith Linhares at Edward Thorp," ArtCritical, March 23, 2011. Retrieved October 24, 2018.Dunham, Judith. "Quiet Mentor: Reviews from San Francisco". Vanguard, Volume 11, September 1983.Desmarais, Charles. "In the galleries, 3 women's approach to art and authenticity," SF Gate, February 2, 2018. Retrieved October 24, 2018. Jennifer Riley wrote, "Linhares has practically invented the genre of imaginative figure painting largely populated by confident women engaged in activities ranging from the banal to the idiosyncratic, thus paving the way for artists such as Amy Cutler, Hilary Harkness, and Dana Schutz."Riley, Jennifer. "Judith Linhares," The Brooklyn Rail, April 10, 2006. Retrieved October 24, 2018.Yau, John. "In Judith Linhares’s Sinless World," Hyperallergic, February 24, 2019. Retrieved April 6, 2022. Linhares is represented by Various Small Fires (Los Angeles),Various Small Fires. Judith Linhares, Artist page. Retrieved October 24, 2018. P.P.O.W. Gallery (New York)P.P.O.W. Judith Linhares, Selected work. Retrieved October 24, 2018. and Anglim Gilbert Gallery (San Francisco).Anglim Gilbert Gallery. Judith Linhares, Retrieved October 24, 2018. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
After CCA, Linhares lived in San Francisco, taught art at area colleges, and exhibited at venues such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Linhares, Philip. Four Women, Catalogue essay, San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Art Institute, 1974. In 1975, the San Francisco Art Institute recognized her with the Adaline Kent Award for promising California artists. In 1978, she received the first of three National Endowment for the Arts grants, and was included in Marcia Tucker's seminal New Museum exhibition, "'Bad' Painting," which brought her wider recognition as an avatar of a nascent Neo-Expressionist figurative turn in art. In 1980, she moved to New York City, continuing to exhibit on both coasts. In subsequent years, Linhares has taught extensively, notably at the School of Visual Arts (1980–2014) and New York University (1986–2006), and exhibited throughout the U.S., including major shows at Edward Thorp Gallery (New York) and Gallery Paule Anglim (San Francisco). Retrospectives of her work have been held at Sonoma State University and the Greenville County Museum of Art ("Dangerous Pleasures," 1994).Sonoma State University Art Gallery. Dangerous Pleasures: The Art of Judith Linhares, Survey catalogue, Sonoma, CA: Sonoma State University Art Gallery, 1994.
Linhares's ability to reconcile these tensions derives from her absorption of a dizzying array of traditions—from Symbolism to Abstract Expressionism to California Funk—whose strategies she turns to her own idiosyncratic aims.Morris, Gay. "Judith Linhares: Strange Pleasure", Art in America, November 1994, p.139. Adams called her "a vanguardist in the reassessment of Mexican influence and spirit in modern art." Pagel wrote that her work revisits German Expressionism, "recuperating its original animal innocence (and playful verve)," sans the recent layers of irony, aggression and bombast added by various Neo-Expressionisms. Linhares cites expressionists Max Beckmann, James Ensor and Edvard Munch, artists negotiating "the line between figuration and abstraction" such as David Park and Bob Thompson, and surrealists Remedios Varo and Toyen, who depicted powerful, sexual women, as key inspirations. In light of the complex welter of influences, critics consistently note Linhares's "evocative magic act"Van Proyen, Mark. "Eccentric Allegories", Art Week, February 18, Vol 15. No.7, 1984. of pulling off work that appears deceptively nonchalant,Wilson, Michael. "Judith Linhares," Artforum, February 2011. Retrieved October 24, 2018. breezy, and improvisational in its "easy virtuosity."
After her move to New York in 1980, Linhares's style and mastery of painting—particularly in gouache—gained momentum. She developed a Symbolist allegorical world of enigmatic, bulbous-headed creatures, narcoleptic nudes, phantasms, figures in boats, and human metamorphosis, invoking dreams, myths and fairy-tales and existential, romantic and spiritual themes.Price, Richard. "Judith Linhares," Arts Magazine, Volume 57, Number 10, June, 1983, p 6.Judith Linhares website. Archive: 1980–1989. Retrieved October 24, 2018. Her fantastic imagery was balanced by lush color, painterly sensual surfaces, and sure design, which critics maintained gave her vision its impact. In paintings such as Woman with Beautiful Hair (1985) or The Beekeeper's Daughter (1990), Linhares began to focus more on single, usually female, figures in illusionistic space. Through the 1990s, critics noted in her work a sunnier palette, increasingly abstract and ambiguous imagery, and a growing facility with a naïve drawing style that recalled the late work of Phillip Guston.Cotter, Holland. "Judith Linhares," The New York Times, February 21, 1997.Judith Linhares website. Archive: 1990–1999. Retrieved October 24, 2018.
In late works, from Starlight (2005) to Wave (2010, top) to Dig (2017), Linhares's commitment to the primacy of composition came to the fore, as she pushed the limits of representation, perspective and coherence.Nys, Shana. "Within the Cave at Durden and Ray," Huffington Post, September 18, 2015. Retrieved October 24, 2018.Judith Linhares website. Archive: 2006–2012. Retrieved October 24, 2018. Writer Madison Smartt Bell (among many) identified "a solid integrity of composition that few latter-day figurative painters can rival, which he credited to Linhares's deep-rooted habit of beginning paintings with abstract fields of color, out of which she gradually pulls her subject. Others have described her paintings as "single-image novellas" that "read with power and immediacy the way the great abstract paintings do." Young, Geoffrey. A Garland for Judith Linhares , Albany, NY: University of Albany Art Museum, 2007. Reviewing the 2006 show, "Rowing in Eden," Jennifer Riley wrote, "Shapes, figures, and colors are arranged like characters on a stage and painted with a deftness that makes this difficult-to-achieve work appear effortless."
In 2019, Linhares appeared in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibition "Contemporary Art: Five Propositions" and had a solo show, "Hearts on Fire," at P.P.O.W.Art Basel. Animal Nature, 2019, Judith Linhares, Artwork. Retrieved April 15, 2022.Press, Clayton. "Judith Linhares, 'Hearts on Fire,' At P.P.O.W., New York," Forbes, February 14, 2019. Retrieved April 6, 2022. Reviewers noted that these later paintings—flowers, animals and nudes in landscapes emerging from bands of abstract color—created a fairy tale world that followed an internal logic and sense of randomness all its own. They described the work, High Desert (2018), for example, as a brightly colored, visionary riff on Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy, whose composition included a nude reclining on a crocheted, patchwork blanket, a watchful lion, and a Technicolor sky likened to "a deconstructed Sol LeWitt wall drawing." The Sarasota Museum of Art exhibition "Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator" (2021) considered the intuitive process and creative inspirations shaping Linhares's practice, with a range of her own paintings, items from her studio including collected objects, photographs and journals, and works by five artists: Bill Adams, Ellen Berkenblit, Karin Davie, Dona Nelson and Mary Jo Vath.Sarasota Museum of Art. "Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator." 2021. Retrieved April 15, 2022.Lederer, Phil. "The Sarasota Art Museum’s new executive director wants to turn a hidden gem into the crown jewel," Continental Mag, January 2022. Retrieved April 15, 2022.
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