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.

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.