Square with Monuments c. 1952

Ynez Johnston made this print, Square with Monuments, and the image is teeming with tiny marks. It looks like a city, or maybe a dream of a city, built from the ground up with marks made by hand. The texture feels almost granular, like sand or tiny stones pressed into the surface, and there's a real physicality to the medium. You can almost feel the artist's hand moving, pressing, and lifting, making each tiny mark. Take a look at the pyramid shapes and the figures with little triangular bodies, like cut paper collage. See how each shape is different, yet they all fit together? It’s like she's inventing a new language of form, one shape at a time. Johnston's playful approach reminds me of Paul Klee, who also loved to mix abstraction and representation in his work. Like him, she embraced ambiguity, inviting us to get lost in the details and discover our own meanings.