Judith Linhares has a fascination with bad taste, the oh-too beautiful, and the color yellow. In her third solo exhibition at P·P·O·W, she doesn’t hold back packing the gallery with paintings that feature strange figurative archetypes, gaudy décor, and kitschy bits all in an embrace of the subversive potential of visual excess.
Linhares gained recognition in the Bay Area during the 1960s and 70s. Her career has challenged traditional taste and subject matter as she moved from illustration to decorative sculptural constructions. A process that has teased an appetite for personal novelties and peculiar symbolisms. The physicality of experience and how clumsy they are drawn, gouached, sculpted, and painted became her way. “I visualize pictures which I associate with certain feelings instead of forcing a rational verbal communication,” she told the San Francisco Examiner in 1976, “This has made me aware of how much I hallucinate and how many pictures are running through my head constantly.” Linhares proximity to the Bay Area Figurative Movement was key — she credits David Park as a great influence.
In 1978, she was included with fellow painters Charles Garabedian, Joan Brown, and Ed Carrillo in the seminal exhibition “Bad Painting,” curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum. It presented artists who made paintings that, according to Tucker’s essay, “defy either deliberately or by virtue of disinterest, the classical canons of good taste, draftsmanship, acceptable source material, rendering, or illusionistic representation.” Tucker singled out Linhares for her “strange elongated” forms originating from “an almost direct translation of her Jungian explorations of the unconscious, which she has systematically used for source material.”
I came to know Linhares’ work in November 2013, when she showed with Fred Valentine in Bushwick. The show was part of my neighborhood “Beat Nite” tour under the auspices of Norte Maar. Then as now, her paintings and unconscious tinkering revealed a distinctive style – crudely constructed paintings that awkwardly narrate. Then as now, they elicited bewilderment.
At P·P·O·W, in a show titled after a poem by Wallace Stevens, Linhares pursues two visible genres – nightstand still-lifes and allegorical landscapes – both of which have a subtext of domesticity.
I designate the still-lifes “nightstand” because Linhares in most of her paintings here, seems to be focused on the tiny, cramped bedside surface and how it customarily collects clutter. In Linhares case: variations of a book, a knickknack, and vase of dying flowers, all resting on starched macrame doily. It’s her personal space, metaphorically for private activities and even states of the mind. Watch Dog is a standout. It features a wide-eyed figurine of a porcelain Staffordshire dog peering out positioned between two vases of flowers, one set on a green polka-dotted linen and both set by another polka-dotted curtain hanging against a mosaic-like wall of bricks. If it sounds busy, it is. Linhares paints sculpturally, focusing on the modeled placement of things.
Linhares has said she concerns herself with process over content—shoveling around with a wide brush to pile up the imagery in her paintings. Yet it’s hard not to take in the symbolism. In Queen of Hearts, the playing card appears twice, suggesting power – albeit second to a king’s – as well as beauty and betrayal. In Roman Venus, a painted sketch recalls Linhares’ early illustrations, not so unlike her friend Robert Crumb’s, her goofy Venus seemingly mocks the goddess’ mythical association with love, desire, and fertility. Both paintings include a draping red sash, which alludes to divine nature and mortal sacrifice.
The figure and its linkage with landscape has been a signature theme for Linhares. Housekeeping is a cultish rendering of a woman’s place. Four standing women form a line hand-in-hand outside a modest house, their nakedness conveying vulnerability. The first holds a broom. In the foreground is a male figure painted blue, lying aroused on a patterned Afghan with his head tossed back. Between the well-stoked fire and the beaming sun, the painting generates plenty of heat and seems to bake in a persistent state of tension between the sexes. In counterpoint, Linhares paints a couple à la Brancusi in Kiss. Kneeling in an embrace, a lion with a radiating mane circles the couple and a gray skull foreshadows the inevitable. In Clearing, a female figure slings a hatchet while a seemingly kitschy tribal figure looks on.
Linhares told Tucker in 1978 that she “enjoyed dealing with subject matter that is loaded with history and implication,” and that her process allowed her to “step out of [her] old skin and into new ways of expression and being.” This show exemplifies her extended pursuit and her brilliant ability to mix complimentary colors of yellow.
“Judith Linhares: The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying,” P·P·O·W, 392 Broadway, New York, NY. Through April 19, 2025.