Judith Linhares

The river is moving, The blackbird must be flying

392 Broadway

March 14 – April 19, 2025

Judith Linhares - The river is moving, The blackbird must be flying - Exhibitions - PPOW

Judith Linhares
Paper Bird, 2023
oil on linen
30 x 23 ins.

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.

Judith Linhares
Kiss, 2024
oil on linen
44 x 61 ins.

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.

Judith Linhares
Backyard Bouquet, 2024
oil on linen
26 x 22 ins.

Judith Linhares (b. 1940) earned her BFA and MFA degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; among others. Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, a major exhibition featuring five decades of work, was presented at the Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, FL, in Winter 2022. The exhibition included a curated presentation of works by Bill Adams, Ellen Berkenblit, Karin Davie, Dona Nelson, and Mary Jo Vath, highlighting the longstanding influence of dialogue between artists. Linhares presented her second solo exhibition with P·P·O·W, Banshee Sunrise, in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions also include Honey in the Rock at Massimo de Carlo, London, UK, and Love Letters from San Jose at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Several works by Linhares were featured in the highly acclaimed group exhibition The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection, The Drawing Center, New York, NY, which was on view through January 19, 2025.