Judith Linhares

P·P·O·W is pleased to present The river is moving, The blackbird must be flying, Judith Linhares’ third solo exhibition with the gallery. Since the late 1970s, Linhares’ work has been influential for many younger artists. However, the construction and style of her paintings are indebted, not only to literary and abstract painterly traditions, but to the radical, performative, and revolutionary poets of the 1950s West Coast scene. The river is moving, The blackbird must be flying marks an evolution in the artist’s practice in which the tactility and vibrancy of the paint itself takes center stage. In a recent essay, Linhares writes, “One aspect of painting I find most interesting and challenging is how the process creates content; I want to make images that flow out of my body much like a performance.” Using large, thick brushes, Linhares dresses her canvases in color and light to create a stage where anything is possible. The performers are then culled from childhood memories, mass media, and bodily experience to create a theatrical visualization of poetry.

For this exhibition, Linhares takes her title from a stanza of a poem by twentieth-century American poet Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” The verse’s rhythmic repetition and sparse nature parallel Linhares’ own visual representation. Like words, which become more ambiguous and open-ended when put to line, meter, and rhyme, so too do Linhares’ figures of women, lovers, animals, flowers, and found objects. The blackbird, so available in the reader’s mind’s eye, is not a specific bird, but rather the ideal of one, much like the archetypes presented in Linhares’ own work. In paintings such as Kiss, 2024, the subjects are revealed through the structure of the painting and allow for multiple interpretations. A couple, reminiscent of Cycladic figurines, embrace atop a geometric quilt set against a dramatic backdrop of sky and mountains. The duo seem totally unaware of the giant lion leering towards them, whose mane appears as a sun, a flower, and pure abstraction all at once. Ranging from large-scale epic scenes to intimate still-lives, Linhares’ works allow viewers to partake in the universal joy of imagination.