Maysha Mohamedi with sketchbook and corresponding painting ("Bait," 2023) at her Los Angeles studio

Maysha Mohamedi

yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste

Past
Sep 6 – Oct 16, 2024
Tokyo
 
EXHIBITION DETAILS

Maysha Mohamedi
yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste
Sep 6 – Oct 16, 2024

GALLERY

1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A
5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku
Tokyo

PRESS

Press Release (ENG)
Press Release (JP)

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Above: Maysha Mohamedi with sketchbook and corresponding painting (Bait, 2023) at her Los Angeles studio. Photo by Megan Cerminaro © Maysha Mohamedi
Pace is pleased to present an exhibition of new, never-before-exhibited paintings by American artist Maysha Mohamedi to mark the grand opening of its Tokyo gallery in the city’s Azabudai Hills.

On view from September 6 to October 16, the show, titled Maysha Mohamedi: yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste, will showcase the artist’s ability to use color and calligraphic abstraction as means for storytelling. To accompany this exhibition, Pace Publishing will produce a facsimile of the studio sketchbook she used for the works in her Tokyo show, featuring a new text by writer Brian Dillon.

Mohamedi—whose work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami—is a self-taught artist raised in San Luis Obispo, California, who trained as a neuroscientist before pursuing a career as a painter. Now based in Los Angeles, she is known for her atmospheric abstractions that reflect her own thinking about universal ideas and experiences. In her paintings populated with idiosyncratic, spirited forms that unfold, unspool, and reveal themselves over time, she explores relationships between color, shape, language, matter. Invention and discovery lie at the center the artist’s approach to mark making, and her paintings are invested in a kind of excavation, in which she carves out space around and through contour. A subtle mystery resides in the core of each of her works—for Mohamedi, this essence is what guides her towards different forms in her painting process, leading her to a sort of untouchable, sacred truth that defies easy articulation and rationalization.

Functioning as maps of cognition and experience, Mohamedi’s compositions are made up of her uncannily crisp brushstrokes and painterly flourishes, which she builds up intuitively and contemplatively. Moments of rupture and embrace can be traced across her abstractions, forged through collisions of her own hand and body with the surfaces of her canvases. Using memories, ideas, words, and feelings as origins for her painted abstractions, she draws from a personal lexicon of geometric shapes to express details and anecdotes from her own life in ineffable, intangible, and universal terms. Mohamedi’s approach to color also grounds her works in her own world—‘collecting’ and archiving colors for her paintings as part of her daily experiences and observations, her chromatic storytelling animates her canvases with a sense of vitality and harmony.

Mohamedi’s first solo show in Japan and all of Asia, this presentation spotlights paintings produced in 2023 and 2024. For these works, she drew inspiration from her diary chronicling her brief time working in Japan two decades ago. In creating her new paintings—half of which are named for people and places that she encountered and wrote about in her journal during that trip—the artist reentered and reactivated the psychic space of her 20s, weaving together coincidences and serendipitous situations from her formative experience abroad and the present circumstances of her life. In this way, the works on view in Tokyo will shed light on one of the hallmarks of Mohamedi’s practice: her use of abstraction to forge a patchwork of stories and scenes from her daily life and interpersonal relationships.

Maysha Mohamedi: yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste will mark the official grand opening of Pace’s new Tokyo gallery, which is welcoming visitors to its preview—a salon-style, rotating presentation of works by artists across its program—through August 17. On the opening day of Mohamedi's exhibition, Pace Live will present “Dip, Draw, Drag," a conversation between the artist, Yasuhide Shimbata, who is Curator of Tokyo’s Artizon Museum, and Pace CEO Marc Glimcher—to RSVP, reach out to pacetokyo@pacegallery.com.

 
Films

Brian Dillon on Maysha Mohamedi's Painting Process, Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini

This lively footage captures Maysha Mohamedi’s process, from the precise to the poetic: writing in and flipping through her sketchbooks, mixing pigments, and applying paint to canvas. Here, we invite you into the artist’s world of colors, forms, shapes, and language, where mysteries abound and discoveries await.

 
Cover of Maysha Mohamedi: yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste
Pace Publishing

Maysha Mohamedi

yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste

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Featured Works

Maysha Mohamedi, Pseudonym, 2024, oil on canvas, 73" × 101" (185.4 cm × 256.5 cm)
Maysha Mohamedi, Paperback Writer, 2024, oil on canvas, 83" × 73" (210.8 cm × 185.4 cm)
Maysha Mohamedi, The Horse that Predicts the Divorce, 2024, oil on canvas, 63" × 51" (160 cm × 129.5 cm)
Maysha Mohamedi, Bait, 2023, oil on canvas, 33" × 28" × 1-1/2" (83.8 cm × 71.1 cm × 3.8 cm)
Maysha Mohamedi, A Woman from Wacko City, 2024, oil on canvas, 33" × 28" (83.8 cm × 71.1 cm)
Maysha Mohamedi, Full Stop, 2024, oil on canvas, 15" (38.1 cm), diameter
 

Installation Views

 
Portrait of Maysha Mohamedi

Photo: Steven Taylor

About the Artist

Vibrant and playful, Maysha Mohamedi’s innovative practice points toward a new mode of atmospheric abstraction that registers certain conditions specific to Los Angeles—and American life as a whole—in the early 21st century. Reflecting her personal history, everyday experiences, and key constellations in her own cultural matrix, her palette is both purely abstract and directly connected to the patchwork of landscapes, objects, and environments that comprise her life.

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