Judith Linhares
"[7][8] Linhares 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.
[1][9][10][11][12] 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.
"[13] Critic John Yau describes her paintings "funny, strange, and disconcerting,"[14] while writer Susan Morgan called them "unexpected and indelible" images exploring "an oddly sublime territory where exuberant bliss remains inseparable from ominous danger.
[3][19][20][21] 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.
[1] 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.
"[21] 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), pushing back against passé notions of "women's art.
[37][31][9] San Francisco critic Alfred Frankenstein recognized them most for their "meticulous draftsmanship" and elegant design sense, calling her a successor to renowned Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada";[38][39] others compared their spiky, linearity and ghostly imagery to the work of Aubrey Beardsley.
[4] Linhares and critics, such as Dan Cameron, mark a four-month sojourn in Guanajuato, Mexico in 1976 as a turning point that refocused her on painting and integrated her subconscious imagery, painterly and narrative impulses, and Jungian, Surrealist, and Mexican and Outsider Art influences.
[22][46][1] These "deftly messy images of carefree, meaty stick figures"[1] and "fantastical tableaux" depict nude (or more aptly, nudist) women set against candy-striped skies and terrain—often free of men—picnicking, communing and working in a languid ease that suggests a lightly worn, but confident feminism.
[53][54] 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.
[23][32] They described the work, High Desert (2018), for example, as a brightly colored, visionary riff on Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy,[23] 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.
