Grand Opening in September｜Tokyo Art Beat

Maysha Mohamedi　”Pseudonym”　2024　© Maysha Mohamedi　Courtesy Pace Gallery

Founded in 1960 by Arne Glimcher and now led by his son Marc Glimcher, Pace has a unique history within the international art world. The gallery has a decades-long relationship with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko and deep ties to Japan’s artistic community.

Pace has locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Geneva, Seoul, and Hong Kong, and its new Tokyo gallery, located in the Azabudai Hills, will be its eighth permanent space globally. Led by Kyoko Hattori, Pace Tokyo—which features interiors designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto—spans three floors and approximately 5,500 square feet of a building by British designer Thomas Heatherwick.

Opening in September, the inaugural exhibition will spotlight new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Maysha Mohamedi in her first solo show in Asia. Mohamedi’s presentation will be followed by New York-based sculptor Arlene Shechet’s first-ever solo exhibition in Japan, opening in November.

Maysha Mohamedi Exhibition (September-October, 2024)

Maysha Mohamedi 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 atmospheric abstractions that reflect her thinking about universal ideas and experiences. In her paintings, populated with idiosyncratic forms that unfold, unspool, and reveal themselves over time, Mohamedi explores relationships between color, shape, language, and matter.

Marking Mohamedi’s first solo show in Tokyo, this presentation spotlights the newest paintings produced in 2023 and 2024. For these works, she drew inspiration from her personal diary chronicling her brief time working in Japan two decades ago. In creating the 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 formative experience abroad and the present circumstances of her life. In this way, the works 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.

Arlene Shechet Exhibition (November-December, 2024)

Born in New York City in 1951 and now based in upstate New York, Arlene Shechet is widely known for her genre-defying ceramics and hybrid sculptures, which merge metal, clay, and wood into distinctive forms that are simultaneously architectural, organic, and mechanical. Uniting seemingly disparate shapes, colors, and materials, her works, while abstract, are imbued with psychological and emotional resonances to invite reflection from the viewer.

Shechet’s first-ever solo exhibition in Japan will bring together new and recent works that ride the edge between stillness and motion, much like the Japanese art and material culture that has long inspired the artist. Enactments of tilting, contorting, bending, and melting recur throughout her sculptures, unearthing the expressive potential of material and form and forcing us to sit with and move around their contradictions.

Alexander Calder at the Azabudai Hills Gallery

Ahead of Pace Tokyo’s grand opening in September, the Alexander Calder exhibition is on view at Azabudai Hills Gallery until September 6, 2024. Copresented by Pace, it features approximately 100 artworks created by Calder between the 1930s and 1970s, ranging from the artist’s signature mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles to his oil paintings and works on paper. Focusing on the enduring resonance of the American modernist’s art with Japanese traditions and aesthetics, this exhibition is the first presentation dedicated to the artist’s work to be mounted in Tokyo in nearly 35 years and the largest-ever exhibition of his work in Japan.