Salt Pepper Prophecy

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene is pleased to present Salt Pepper Prophecy, an online exhibition of new paintings by Maysha Mohamedi.

The works in Salt Pepper Prophecy begin as recipes. Mohamedi sources the color palettes for each painting from images in the 1972, multi-volume Family Circle Illustrated Library of Cooking. Published by the staple women’s magazine Family Circle, the cookbooks embody a dominant strain of 20th-century American domesticity and visual culture. For the sweeping washes of paint in Birdie on the Back of a Sleeping Tiger (2020), Mohamedi extracted hues of tomato and pear from the illustrated recipe for “Rhubarb and Yogurt Pudding.” Atop these washes the artist applies sporadic and repeating line work, drawing across the canvas with a lyrical intensity. The gestural, thin marks at times resemble the calligraphic script of Farsi, the artist’s native tongue; she often turns to her Persian-English Dictionary as an associative guide for mark making.

Gleaning elements from writing systems and vintage documents of manicured Americana, Mohamedi works in an imaginative realm of cultural reappropriation. Her abstraction embodies, and finds new language for, the radical domesticity she performs in the face of today’s chronic uncertainty.

Maysha Mohamedi lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She has exhibited at The Pit, The Lodge, Lowell Ryan Projects, La Loma Projects, and Steve Turner, Los Angeles, CA; San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, CA; Interface Gallery, Oakland, CA; Gallery 16, San Francisco, CA; Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR; and Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY (forthcoming). She received her MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

For further information, visit our Viewing Room or contact gallery@nicellebeauchene.com.