LONDON.- Pace presents Mika Tajima: Anthesis, an exhibition of new and recent work by Mika Tajima, at its Hanover Square gallery in London. On view from September 3 through October 4, this solo presentation, the artist’s first in London since joining the gallery’s program in 2022, will debut a new body of work, titled Negentropica. Paintings and sculptures from Tajima’s Art d’Ameublement, Negative Entropy, and Pranayama series will also feature, representing her latest investigations into energy, invisible forces, and the self in a networked age.

For almost two decades, Taijma’s multidisciplinary practice, which spans painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, has given substance to the ideas and qualities that circumscribe human agency within our built and virtual environments. Examining three consistent concepts—of control, freedom, and performance—her work is grounded in the material and sensorial, translating extensive theoretical research into physical objects.

The exhibition at Pace takes its title, Anthesis, from the term used to describe the moment a flower reaches full bloom—when the plant is at its most functional and expressive state. Drawing on this idea, the works on view employ recording, transformation, and containment—arduous attempts to resist natural decay and simultaneously underscore impermanence. In this context, anthesis, associated with both scientific quantification and aesthetic brilliance, offers a metaphorical framework for the show, capturing possibilities of becoming and the fragility of presence.

At the center of Anthesis, two new works—Negentropica 1 and 2 (both 2025)—feature iris flowers arranged within pierced and carved black marble boulders that serve as vessels. Their decay has been chemically slowed, altering their corporeal presence; illuminated in ultraviolet (UV) light, they emit a spectral glow that likewise recasts the typical bounds of human perception. Held within the stone’s carved cavities, the transience of plant life meets the slow, dense temporality of tectonic formation. Tajima’s reconfiguration of both organic and geological elements gestures toward greater forces of human intervention: the deep, structural extraction of the earth, and contemporary attempts to prolong—or “hack”—human biology.

Negentropy—from which this body of work takes its title—refers to a system becoming more ordered and internally structured, in contrast to entropy, which describes a move toward disorder. The tensions in these works between temporal scales, nature, and technology unsettle how we perceive time, presence, and transformation. In Tajima’s words: “To the flower, our years would stretch into near-geological time; to us, the flower is fleeting—intense and beautiful, then gone.”