Judith Linhares
1940–

Judith Linhares (born 1940) is an American painter, known for her vibrant, expressive figurative and narrative paintings. She came of age and gained recognition in the Bay Area culture of the 1960s and 1970s and has been based in New York City since 1980. Curator Marcia Tucker featured her in the influential New Museum show, "'Bad' Painting" (1978), and in the 1984 Venice Biennale show, "Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained: American Visions of the New Decade." Linhares synthesizes influences including Expressionism, Bay Area Figuration, Mexican modern art and second-wave feminism, in work that flirts with abstraction and balances visionary personal imagery, expressive intensity, and pictorial rigor. Art historian Whitney Chadwick wrote, "Linhares is an artist for whom painting has always mattered as the surest path of synthesizing experience and interior life," her works "emerging as if by magic from an alchemical stew of vivid complementary hues and muted tonalities." Critic John Yau describes her paintings "funny, strange, and disconcerting," while writer Susan Morgan called them "unexpected and indelible" images exploring "an oddly sublime territory where exuberant bliss remains inseparable from ominous danger."

Linhares has been recognized with more than forty-five one-person exhibitions, major awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among many, and acquisitions by numerous public collections. Critics, such as The New York Times' Ken Johnson identify her as a key forerunner to and influence on several waves of younger figurative artists. Jennifer Riley wrote, "Linhares has practically invented the genre of imaginative figure painting largely populated by confident women engaged in activities ranging from the banal to the idiosyncratic, thus paving the way for artists such as Amy Cutler, Hilary Harkness, and Dana Schutz." Linhares is represented by Various Small Fires (Los Angeles), P.P.O.W. Gallery (New York) and Anglim Gilbert Gallery (San Francisco). She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.