Judith Linhares

Through her painting practice, Judith Linhares plays with themes of narrative, mythology, utopianism, and gender politics. Many women, some men, and quite a few beasts, roam through her colorful, gestural, and succulent wildernesses. Linhares’s tender brushwork evinces the artist’s equal obsessions with the haptic sensation of painting and her countless imagined worlds. For instance, Linhares’s 2010 oil painting Wave depicts three Siren-like nude women, who cavort in and by the sea, inviting the viewer to join them, their call amplified by the kaleidoscopic color and creamily laid paint—a combination that imbues the image with roiling, erotic sensuality. 

Linhares is the recipient of a 2012 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting Fellowship, the 2008 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in the Visual Arts, and the 2000 Pollock Krasner Foundation Award, among many others. Her work is featured in collections worldwide such as that of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. Selected exhibitions include shows at the New Museum in New York and the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT.