Maysha Mohamedi : yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste
Cover of Maysha Mohamedi: yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste, 2024 © Pace Gallery
Vibrant and playful, Maysha Mohamedi’s innovative practice points toward a new mode of abstraction that forges a patchwork of stories and scenes from her daily life and interpersonal relationships.
Maysha Mohamedi: yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste, 2024 © Pace Gallery
Published on the occasion of her first solo show at Pace in Tokyo, this facsimile edition of Mohamedi’s studio notebook spotlights never-before-exhibited paintings produced in 2023 and 2024 and the varied clippings from vintage magazines and other printed ephemera that influenced their palettes. For these works, Mohamedi drew inspiration from her personal 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. With a new text by Brian Dillon, this volume offers an up-close look at Mohamedi’s singular process.
Maysha Mohamedi: yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste, 2024 © Pace Gallery
“To give a name to a color is to fix its mystery and mutability once and for all, to approach it with a certain scientific precision—and at the same time turn it into pure metaphor, a quality that is never quite itself.”
Maysha Mohamedi: yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste, 2024 © Pace Gallery
“Mohamedi’s paintings emerge out of a seedbed of observation and discovery: the found images from which she selects colors to be deployed in a painting.”
Maysha Mohamedi: yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste, 2024 © Pace Gallery
Publication Details
Text by Brian Dillon
Design by Tara Stewart
2024
Spiral Bound Softcover
72 pages
11.6 x 9.5 in.
Above: Maysha Mohamedi with sketchbook and corresponding painting (Bait, 2023) at her Los Angeles studio. Photo by Megan Cerminaro © Maysha Mohamedi
The book can be ordered here. For more information about other titles from Pace Publishing, visit here; please visit Pace Gallery’s website here for more information about past, current, and future exhibits. There was an exhibition of the same name yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste that opened on Sep 6 and closed on Oct 16, 2024, at the Pace Gallery Tokyo location. More details about this exhibition here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
