Judith Linhares

Judith Linhares is heralded as a painterly painter whose deliberately crude style has inspired a generation of younger figurative artists. Known for bright color and confident narrative visions, she is on familiar terms with animals, flowers, invented structures, fairy tales, and dream logic. Curator Geoffrey Young says,”Her candor is all in the wrist.” In Fence (2000), Linhares paints a fence fragment in the middle distance of a barren expanse. Of this, Young writes, "Bathed in light, her fence is just there, like a fact, its simple content made strange and beautiful by painterly sophistication.”

Born in Pasadena, California, in 1940, Judith Linhares lives and works in New York City. She earned her BFA and MFA from California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland. Her work has been featured in over 30 solo exhibitions and 75 group exhibitions, including the seminal Bad Painting exhibition curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1978. The recipient of multiple honors and awards, Linhares has been awarded a Civitella Ranierei Residency Grant; an Anonymous Was a Woman grant; a Guggenheim Fellowship; and three National Endowment for the Arts grants. Her work can be found in the public collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut; and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York among others.