Rooted in the California Bay Area Counterculture of the 60s and 70s, Judith Linhares (b. 1940) combines modes of abstract expressionism with Bay Area figuration to conjure uniquely irradiant narratives. In Gaze, 2019, Linhares’ languorous protagonist scans a star-filled sky, warmed by her fire and satiated by her picnic. A diminutive man in the landscape’s periphery gazes longingly at her prone form but she pays him no heed as she finds self-fulfillment in her own ascendancy. Approaching figuration through abstracted forms, Linhares uses sumptuous colors to depict women communing with nature, alongside colorful portraits of farm animals and floral still lives. In his review of Linhares’ debut solo show at P•P•O•W, Hearts on Fire, Frieze Magazine’s Evan Moffitt wrote, “The bright purples, pink and marigolds of her canvases are colours that don’t exist in Manhattan, or possibly anywhere else on this planet. Slightly alien, too, are the distended bodies of her figures, exclusively female and nude. With Linhares’ goggles on, art history becomes an LSD fever dream.” Sexual without being sexy, her nude female figures lay claim to their domestic and natural landscape. Whether climbing trees, riding on horseback, or delighting in drunken revelry, Linhares’ sirens build fairy tales and mythologies all their own. Judith Linhares earned her BFA and MFA degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. She was included in the influential Bad Painting exhibition at the New Museum, organized by legendary curator Marcia Tucker. In the early 1990s, a traveling survey, Dangerous Pleasures: The Art of Judith Linhares, toured museums and galleries on both coasts. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally and will be included in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ Contemporary Art: Five Propositions opening October 26, 2019. Linhares is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has received multiple grants from the National Endowments for the Arts. Her work is held in many permanent collections, including the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019) activated the female nude with a multidisciplinary practice that spanned sixty years and included painting, assemblage, performance, and film. By connecting the kinetic nature of her early paintings and assemblages to her radical performances and films, Schneemann’s work made a permanent mark on the history of art. P•P•O•W will present Venus Vectors, 1987, a monumental sculpture with video, and the mixed-media diagram Venus Vector Vocabulary, 1990. Both works stem from the late artist’s 1981-83 performance Fresh Blood - A Dream Morphology, which deconstructs cultural notions of the feminine as a metaphoric battleground. A kinetic sculpture, Venus Vectors is composed of ten transparent acrylic panels that radiate out towards the viewer, baring images of the human body, sacred artifacts, organic forms and common characters that share V-shaped form. Venus Vector Vocabulary, a visual taxonomy of V-forms alongside notes and drawings explicating her earlier performance, in many ways is the key, not only to Venus Vectors, but to Schneemann’s entire oeuvre. Schneemann’s work has been exhibited worldwide, at institutions including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and The Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid. The comprehensive retrospective Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Paintings recently traveled from Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2015), to the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2017) and MoMA PS1, New York (2018). A major retrospective of Schneemann’s work is slated to open at the Barbican Centre, UK in 2020

Suzanne Treister (b. 1958) has been a pioneer in digital, new media, and web-based media art since the late-1980s. Her work is often made in elaborate, years-long series of watercolor diagrams which conjure fictional worlds, international collaborative organizations, and apocalyptic or regenerative futures. P•P•O•W will present a new series of paintings from SURVIVOR (F), a hallucinogenic exploration of a future reality in undetermined time and space. Begun in 2016, this series presents manifestations of a fictional survivor of the human race, visions of a post-futuristic sublime, and diagrams of the psychedelic consciousness of SURVIVOR (F), an entity that is both human and non-human, agency and non- agency. Treister studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London (1978-1981) and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1981-1982) and currently lives and works in London. Recent exhibitions include solo and group shows at the ICA London; 10th Shanghai Biennale, China; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA), Netherlands; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Raven Row, London; Secession, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art (CAPC) Bordeaux and Annely Juda Fine Art, London. Treister’s work is held in private and public collections including Tate Britain; Science Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. From SURVIVOR (F) to The Escapist BHST (Black Hole Spacetime), a solo exhibition of paintings and watercolors, will be on view at Annely Juda Fine Art from September 19 – November 2, 2019. On September 19, a digital exhibition of the same name will be launched by Serpentine Galleries, London, and will be accessible through “a ring of sky-based portals in Augmented Reality”, which can also be downloaded and set as desktop images on computer screens, tablets and phones. This project will also take the form of a fully illustrated book by Serpentine Galleries and Koenig Books, London. Treister’s work is also featured in the 16th edition of the Istanbul Biennial, The Seventh Continent, on view through November 10.

In his last major body of work, Martin Wong (1946-1999) turned his attention to his own heritage, painting scenes from New York and San Francisco’s Chinatowns. In addition to depictions of local businesses and annual festivals, this series explores Bruce Lee’s impact on American popular culture, Chinese American self-awareness, along with Wong’s own identity. More explicitly than other Chinatown work, Bruce Lee in the Afterworld, 1991 depicts Lee almost as a saint and plays with ideas of Chinese masculinity and sexuality within American culture. The actor’s iconic image as a heroic fighter propelled the popularity of the martial arts in America and created a lasting symbol of masculinity. Wong was active in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene during the 1970s and was involved with the performance art groups, The Cockettes and Angels of Light. In 1978 he moved to Manhattan, eventually settling in the Lower East Side, where his attention turned exclusively to painting. Wong set forth to depict urban life on the Lower East Side where he then lived. Wong died in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness in 1999. His work can be found in museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bronx Museum of The Arts, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Wong had a one person show Sweet Oblivion at the New Museum (1998). Wong's retrospective, Human Instamatic, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015, the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio in May of 2016 and traveled to the UC Berkeley Art Museum in 2017.