Judith Linhares (1940)

Judith Linhares

Judith Linhares is an American painter, known for her vibrant, expressive figurative and narrative paintings. She synthesizes influences including Expressionism, Bay Area Figuration, Mexican modern art and second-wave feminism, in work that flirts with abstraction and balances visionary personal imagery, expressive intensity, and pictorial rigor. In the early 1970s, Linhares created narrative drawings and assemblages that appropriated commonplace or "craft" materials and feminine imagery (flowers, eggs, swan feathers, domestic scenes). After 1980 she developed a Symbolist allegorical world of enigmatic, bulbous-headed creatures, narcoleptic nudes, phantasms, figures in boats, and human metamorphosis. Her fantastic imagery was balanced by lush color, painterly sensual surfaces, and sure design. 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. In the 2000s, Linhares has turned to female nudes (often monumental), visionary landscapes, floral still lifes and animals. Linhares has been recognized with more than forty-five one-person exhibitions and major awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

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