Maysha Mohamedi @ Pace Gallery, Tokyo - "yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste" Inaugural Pace's Tokyo Gallery Exhibition + Book

Maysha Mohamedi 

yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste

Pace Gallery, Tokyo

September 6 – October 16, 2024

Maysha Mohamedi with sketchbook 

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.

Maysha Mohamedi

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

www.pacegallery.com

Artist Maysha Mohamedi @ Pace Gallery, Berlin - "Mute Counsel" - Pop-Up Exhibition by Pace

Maysha Mohamedi: Mute Counsel

Pop-Up Exhibition by Pace, Berlin

April 27 – June 26, 2024

Maysha Mohamedi 

My Angels Flew Miles to Reach Me, 2024 

© Maysha Mohamedi, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents Maysha Mohamedi: Mute Counsel, a pop-up exhibition of nine new paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist. This marks the artist’s first show in Germany, and her second presentation with Pace since joining the gallery’s program in 2022. In these paintings, Maysha Mohamedi (b. 1980) continues her exploration of fundamental relationships between colour and shape, language, matter, and being.

Invention and discovery lie at the centre of Maysha Mohamedi’s approach to mark making, posing a paradoxically simple question: What is shape? Her works suggest that shape is more process than product. Shape begins when emptiness is interrupted: when two points coalesce into a line so that the solidity of colour is birthed as form. The paintings in Mute Counsel unfold slowly, spooling and unspooling time. Investing form with an almost animistic vivacity, it is as if each shape in Maysha Mohamedi’s paintings were possessed of an individual spirit or personality. Like people, her shapes seem at first to belong to types, yet, on closer inspection, each is emphatically unique.

Maysha Mohamedi’s compositions suggest fields of irruption. Like lunar surfaces—which bear the history of innumerable collisions with celestial bodies inscribed over millennia—her paintings record the many soft and sensuous collisions between her own body and the surface of the canvas. The act of painting becomes an act of touch, a series of moments of rupture or embrace. Like ever-extending ripples, she sets into motion a process through which form takes shape.

The artist’s fascination with the brain’s processing of visual information, stemming from her academic background in neuroscience, drives her to question how reality is deconstructed and reconstructed through infinitesimal differences, yet perceived as a seamless whole. “All visual processing is about calculating difference,” Maysha Mohamedi has explained, “How do you determine and locate edges? Everything depends on the edge.”

Canvases of varying scales orient us toward the world and its edges. In particular, they investigate the edges between language, desire, and selfhood. In Maysha Mohamedi’s work, visual form testifies to an encounter with the aesthetic and formal resonance of writing. Composed from a personal lexicon of geometric inventions, Mohamedi’s linear forms have their origin in her intuitive contemplation of the look, feel, or sound of certain words. Through acts of performative transformation, Mohamedi’s paintings subsume signification into a new visual language of shape and rhythm, colour and contour, that is both radically specific and emphatically universal.

Colour, for Maysha Mohamedi, serves two essential purposes. First, the chromatic story of a painting grounds it in the world and in the artist’s own life. Originating in her daily existence, Mohamedi ‘collects’ colours in an archive of material encounters: sea glass gathered on a beach, for example, a half-burnt candle from her son’s birthday cake; the marigold eyeball of a pigeon who jumped onto her lap; or the quality of red ink on a love note remembered in a diary. Maysha Mohamedi equally utilises colour as a tool for producing a sense of harmony. Balancing the asymmetry of the composition, colour accords the painting’s solicitation to the world, and to us. The seduction of abstraction, for Mohamedi, exists to confirm our aliveness.

Yet a paradox persists: the paintings originate in Maysha Mohamedi’s internal world while, at the same time, requiring her to “empty out” her sense of herself in order to make them. As Mohamedi has explained, she herself disappears when she paints. What results are objects both of her and not of her. This contradiction rests at the heart of Mohamedi’s work, which seems to originate in nature while remaining radically human.

In 2023, Pace established a private office in Berlin helmed by Laura Attanasio, with a focus on supporting the gallery’s expanding vision in Europe and contributing to Berlin’s vibrant art scene. This exhibition is presented in a gallery space located in the Mercator Höfe on Potsdamer Strasse in Berlin-Tiergarten.

For a short biography of Maysha Mohamedi, you can see:

Maysha Mohamedi: Gamebreaker, Pace Gallery, New York, May 12 – July 1, 2023

PACE, BERLIN

Mercator Höfe, Potsdamer Strasse 77-87, 10785 Berlin

www.pacegallery.com

Maysha Mohamedi @ Pace Gallery, NYC - Gamebreaker

Maysha Mohamedi: Gamebreaker

Pace Gallery, New York

May 12 – July 1, 2023

Maysha Mohamedi 

Mrs. Law, 2023 

© Maysha Mohamedi, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of new paintings by Maysha Mohamedi at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This show, titled Gamebreaker, marks the artist’s debut exhibition with Pace and her first-ever solo presentation in New York. Gamebreaker coincides with the 2023 editions of Frieze New York and TEFAF New York.

Maysha Mohamedi, who joined the gallery’s program in 2022, is known for her singular approach to Color Field painting. A self-taught artist raised in San Luis Obispo, California and now based in Los Angeles, Mohamedi has developed a new mode of atmospheric abstraction that reflects the patchwork of scenes, objects, and environments that comprise her life, creating paintings that function as maps of sensation, cognition, and experience. Through a distinct visual lexicon of forms, symbols, and marks, the artist infuses her canvases with a rhythmic energy that suggests unfolding poetry. The calligraphic lines that proliferate across her compositions possess an oneiric quality, as if the complex layers of form and color are part of an arcane choreography. Replete with personal resonances and liberated from the constraints of the three-dimensional world, Maysha Mohamedi’s immersive, illimitable works invite viewers into a spirited exchange and communion.

Investigations into the expressive possibilities of color are central to the artist’s practice. Each of her works begins with two fixed variables: a color palette that she has culled from printed ephemera or found objects, along with an encounter, experience, feeling, or idea. As part of her process, Mohamedi records the formulas for her paintings in notebooks, documenting the colors and conceptual underpinnings of every artwork she produces. From that point, she takes an intuitive approach, eschewing preliminary sketching to forge lyrical choreographies of color and form directly onto her canvases. Line is a central component of the artist’s work—early in her process, she uses a mechanical pencil to draw standalone linear forms, as well as the individual marks that comprise various shapes, on her paintings. Employing subtractive and additive techniques, Mohamedi foregrounds enactments of fragmentation and cohesion in her networks of shape and line. Her paintings are spaces for exploring qualities of contact and touch, and the surfaces of her works become tactile expressions of immediate encounters in the present moment.

Maysha Mohamedi’s exhibition with Pace in New York spotlights a selection of new paintings varying in scale. While some of these works chronicle the artist’s experience or interpretation of specific situations, others can be understood as portraits of people in her life. Cheers to My Children (2022), the largest work Maysha Mohamedi has ever produced, will figure prominently in her show. As its title suggests, the artist created this work as a monumental and deeply personal expression of love for her two young sons.

With a color palette derived from a children’s poetry book dating to the 1960s, Cheers to My Children centers on formal pairings. Each abstraction bears subtle but unmistakable differences from its counterpart, and no two forms in a pairing are rendered in the same color. Delicate lines cut around and across these constellations, giving the composition a buoyant, energetic quality. This emotionally resonant work brims with visual idiosyncrasies that reveal themselves to viewers through thoughtful looking.

In Gifted and Moody on Torrey Pines Beach (2022), another work in the exhibition, the artist brings her abstract forms into close conversation, capturing the intimacy that comes with the discovery of a shared experience between acquaintances. The largest form in the painting is also the work’s most vibrant element, executed in a luscious red tone, while other abstractions are presented in muted green, yellow, grey, and the artist’s signature black pigment. At once lively and harmonious, Gifted and Moody on Torrey Pines Beach evokes the attendant gratitude and joy of an unexpected interpersonal connection.

Maysha Mohamedi’s layered paintings, which she constructs through a series of ritual gestures, can be understood in conversation with those of Abstract Expressionist forebears like Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, and Joan Mitchell, as well as Color Field painters like Mark Rothko, and a range of other pioneering abstractionists that have blurred the line between the graphic and painterly mark, in particular Cy Twombly. Her vibrant and innovative works register certain conditions specific to Los Angeles—and to American life as a whole—in the early 21st century.

Maysha Mohamedi (b. 1980, Los Angeles) received a BS in 2002 from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied cognitive science, specializing in neuroscience. After graduating, she went on to earn an MFA in painting from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2011. In her abstract paintings, the artist meditates on selfhood and consciousness through a singular lexicon of color, composition, and mark-making. Reflecting her personal history, everyday experiences, and key constellations in her own cultural matrix as a woman of Iranian descent, 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 three-dimensional 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’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions with The Lodge, Los Angeles (2018); Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); and Massimo De Carlo, Paris (2022). Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, Oregon (2019); and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2021), among others.

PACE NEW YORK

540 West 25th Street, New York, NY

www.pacegallery.com