Maysha Mohamedi
yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste
Pace Gallery, Tokyo
September 6 – October 16, 2024
and corresponding painting (Bait, 2023)
at her Los Angeles studio
Photo by Megan Cerminaro
© Maysha Mohamedi, courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery
Pace presents 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.
The show, titled Maysha Mohamedi: yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste, showcases the artist’s ability to use color and calligraphic abstraction as means for storytelling. To accompany this exhibition, Pace Publishing produces a facsimile of the studio sketchbook she used for the works in her Tokyo show, featuring a new text by writer Brian Dillon.
yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste
PACE PUBLISHING, 2024
Text by Brian Dillon
Design by Tara Stewart
Spiral Bound Softcover, 72 pages, 11.6 x 9.5 in.
© Image courtesy of Pace Publishing
Maysha 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, Maysha 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.
Maysha 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 Maysha Mohamedi’s practice: her use of abstraction to forge a patchwork of stories and scenes from her daily life and interpersonal relationships.
Vibrant and playful, MAYSHA MOHAMEDI’s (b. 1980, Los Angeles) 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. These range from an Ojai, California playground the artist visited with her children, clippings from cookbooks and magazines, to sea glass found on the shore. Maysha Mohamedi’s works are reflections of her own thinking, crystallized as moments of haptic communion. The artist’s academic background in neuroscience is found in the liveliness and expansiveness of her paintings. Liberated from the constraints and dictates of the threedimensional world, her immersive works exude a sense of freedom and illimitability. For Maysha Mohamedi, the viewer is an equal creator in this shared universe of boundless possibilities.
Maysha Mohamedi received a Bachelor of Science in 2002 from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied cognitive science, specializing in neuroscience, and she earned a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2011. Maysha Mohamedi’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles; Massimo De Carlo, Paris; and The Lodge, Los Angeles. She has also been included in group exhibitions at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon; Mu.ZEE, Ostend, Belgium; and other spaces. Mohamedi lives and works in Los Angeles.
PACE GALLERY TOKYO
1F; Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A
5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo
