Art work by Judith Linhares / Courtesy the artist / P.P.O.W.

Women inhabit their bodies on their own terms in Judith Linhares’s paintings, rendered in the color-loaded, wet-into-wet strokes of the artist’s signature wide brush. The octogenarian American has lived in New York City since 1980, but her enchantingly weird pictures retain the lush light and wild spirit of her coastal California youth (as seen in “Star Light,” from 2022, pictured above). Linhares is an unabashed feminist, but that doesn’t make her a political artist. Instead, her improvisational narratives, with their amazons and their witches, draw on the mythic and the metaphysical—her dream journals are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art—aligning her as much with the Abstract Expressionists as with her fellow figurative renegades. But with women’s rights currently under threat, the world of freedom that Linhares portrays in her new show, “Banshee Sunrise,” on view at the P.P.O.W. gallery through May 28, feels totemic.