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

Published on the occasion of her debut solo exhibition in Asia at Pace in Tokyo, the facsimile edition of Maysha Mohamedi’s studio notebook, titled “yesterday I was a tiny tube of toothpaste”, offers an intimate and multi-layered window into the artist’s singular creative process. The volume spotlights a newly unveiled body of paintings produced between 2023 and 2024 alongside the diverse clippings from vintage magazines and printed ephemera that inspired their distinctive color palettes. Deeply rooted in her personal history, these works draw inspiration from a diary Mohamedi kept during a brief period living and working in Japan two decades prior. By naming half of her new paintings after the people and places recorded in those journal entries, the artist deliberately reentered and reactivated the psychic space of her twenties, seamlessly weaving past serendipitous encounters with the present circumstances of her life.

Functioning as intricate maps of cognition and experience, Mohamedi’s abstractions are built through an intuitive, contemplative process marked by uncannily crisp brushstrokes and expressive painterly flourishes. Traces of rupture and embrace emerge across her canvases, forged through the tactile physical collision of her hand and body with the surface. Rather than relying on direct representation, she draws from a highly personal lexicon of geometric shapes to translate private memories, feelings, written words, and anecdotes into an intangible yet universal visual language. This conceptual depth is further grounded by her archival approach to color, wherein she continuously collects and categorizes shades from her daily observations to animate her canvases with vitality and harmony. Complete with a new text by writer Brian Dillon, this volume stands as a compelling primary-source document that illuminates the deep interplay between memory, ephemera, and abstract painting in Mohamedi’s practice.-Dimitris Lempesis