Ynez Johnston: In Search of the Oracle
October 3, 2026 – January 9, 2027
Opening reception: October 3, 5 – 7pm
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Ynez Johnston: In Search of the Oracle. This exhibition explores the enduring allure of Johnston’s (1920-2019) innovative artmaking practice, which spanned seven decades of painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Her captivating visual language evolved from an amalgamation of ancient and modern cross-cultural influences, emerging as a fully-fledged chimerical phenomenon all its own that was immutably tethered to her strange and romantic inner life.
A Berkeley, CA native, Johnston found early success at age 22 with her first solo museum exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA). Her inclusion in a three-person New Talent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York made a name for her on the East Coast in 1950; meanwhile, she was establishing herself as a unique voice in the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene. Johnston’s close friends came to include such contemporaries as June Wayne, Emerson Woelffer, Lee Mullican, Luchita Hurtado, Matsumi Kanemitsu, and Leonard Edmondson, though she was never formally affiliated with any particular aesthetic movement or group. Her artistic activities earned her a Los Angeles Times “Woman of the Year” award in 1959.
Johnston’s distinctive voice, rooted in a lifelong passion for travel, threads unmistakably through her diverse body of work. A dizzying collection of influences – Maya glyphs, Tibetan thangkas, Byzantine mosaics, erotic Indian temple carvings, the works of Henri Matisse and Paul Klee – coalesces into an enigmatic symbolic vocabulary that invites focused and intimate decrypting. Johnston’s works return obsessively to tantalizingly familiar yet fundamentally alien images: fanciful creatures prowling invented continents, cloud cities bristling with pyramids and palaces, bulbous ships traversing whirling maelstroms.
Johnston’s inventive, spontaneous, and frequently unconventional use of materials offered a direct conduit to what the artist referred to as “an unconscious channel, a subterranean life-force.” Just as the Oracle of Delphi transmitted Apollo’s divine word to mortals in the form of cryptic prophesy, Johnston’s automatic artmaking manifested mysterious images seemingly pulled directly from the collective unconscious. Hovering at the beguiling threshold of comprehension, Johnston’s singular vision chronicles a mystical codex from a far-off realm, waiting to be deciphered by fellow travelers.
Ynez Johnston earned her BFA in 1941 and her MFA in 1947 from the University of California, Berkeley. Her works have been regularly exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. She is represented in over 100 institutional collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
The exhibition’s companion catalogue, which includes contributions from former Los Angeles Times art critic Suzanne Muchnic and scholar David Pagel, will be out in print this fall and is available for pre-order.
Louis Stern Fine Arts is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Ynez Johnston.
https://www.louissternfinearts.com/exhibitions/ynez-johnston-in-search-of-the-oracle#tab:thumbnails
