Maysha Mohamedi

Maysha the Fool, the artist’s upcoming presentation with Pace, takes its title from Gimpel the Fool, a short story by Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer that Mohamedi read while making her latest paintings. Published in Yiddish in 1945 and translated into English by Saul Bellow in 1953, it tells of a naïve, goodhearted baker in a Polish shtetl who believes the malicious lies of his neighbors. Tricked and deceived by others, Gimpel ultimately finds that his innocence and faith fortify him against human cruelty.

For this body of paintings, Mohamedi drew inspiration from the story’s message of transcendence and enlightenment. These works have also been informed by her recent pursuits—writing plays and acting in local theater productions in Los Angeles, adopting a rigorous weightlifting routine, and exploring new methods of spiritual focus and devotion—which have expanded her artistic expression. Her works are as much divinations as they are paintings, synchronizing fables and modes of worship from different traditions to uncover truths that are at once universal and deeply personal.

Mohamedi’s new paintings were born from her communion and communication with an invisible world. She draws each of her shapes and forms freehand, embarking on a meditative journey of making that allows her compositions to emerge and awaken over time. Mediated through the prisms of her spiritual and personal experiences over the past year, these works are increasingly active at their edges, transmuting feelings and ideas into new and mysterious energies beyond the canvas. “Nothing makes more sense than making spiritual paintings,” Mohamedi explains.

As part of her process, she derives the color palettes for her compositions from printed ephemera like vintage lifestyle and travel magazines, advertisements, photographs she herself captures, and other found objects. These colors, which she “collects” in her archive of material encounters, ground her works in the story of her life. Though the narrative contexts of the colors have little bearing on the shapes and stories that emerge on canvas, there is an energetic transfer and a potent alchemy in these chromatic relationships. Pace Publishing’s new facsimile of Mohamedi’s notebook sheds light on this aspect of her practice, and it features author Mabel Hale’s essay “Sincerity” from her book Beautiful Girlhood, a copy of which the artist discovered during her recent travels in Alaska.