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 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 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.

Louis Stern Fine Arts is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Ynez Johnston.