ART-PRESENTATION: Mandy El Sayegh-Mutations In Blue, White & Red
Mandy El-Sayegh’s research-based practice stems from an interrogation of the part-to-whole relation in the fields of science and philosophy. Working across painting, installation, drawing and writing, she addresses the breakdown of sociopolitical, economic and semantic orders whilst also exploring the poetic and linguistic capacities of fragmented codes. This exploration manifests itself through a practice of continually evolving methods and experimental processes, in which conditions are set up to engender chance response and open up space for the production of composites.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive
Mandy El-Sayegh in her solo exhibition “MUTATIONS IN BLUE, WHITE AND RED” presents recent paintings, drawings, and sculpture. The exhibition brings together examples from different series of works by El-Sayegh, which together form an artistic practice rooted in assemblage and the political, social, and economic complexities of humanity. Featured in the exhibition are a number of mixed-media paintings from El-Sayegh’s “Net-Grid” and “White Grounds” series, along with examples of her “Windows” series, which is comprised of intricate blue ink drawings executed on large-scale canvases. Also on view is a selection of the artist’s table works, vitrine-like sculptures containing small latex objects, images, and found ephemera, as well as works from her “Piece Paintings” series, which are exhibited here for the first time. El-Sayegh has also created an installation where she has applied layers of The Financial Times to the walls and floor of one of the galleries, offering a different surface for the work. The Financial Times, chosen both for its signification of global finance and the flesh-pink tone of its pages, reflects El-Sayegh’s interest in the complex interactions (and often confrontations) between the body and the political landscape. El-Sayegh’s process often begins with periods of focused research of written material, scientific and biological diagrams, and pop cultural imagery. Adapting elements of psychoanalysis to a formal aesthetic that merges minimalism, pop, and figuration, she occupies a quasi-paranoiac worldview as a creative response to societal alienation. The task of genealogy for El-Sayegh is then not just to expose a historical body or the epistemic violence that forges it discursively, but rather to trace its transformations: mobilizing memory as source material to assemble complex layered trajectories that connect charged personal stories to historical circumstances and broader philosophical structures. Through the formal logics of painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, El-Sayegh expands the biographical into urgent conversations about Arab subjectivities and the colonial projects that continue to define them. “My practice is preoccupied with part-whole relations and with ‘procedural thinking’ that allows for observable growth and decay”. With intricate graphic webs of abstracted imagery suggesting unchecked growth, El-Sayegh’s crystalline blue ink Windows works are perhaps her clearest allusion to autonomous organic patterning, but the interest spans her entire oeuvre. Though El-Sayegh’s processes are deeply invested in systems, she simultaneously questions and rejects the systematic, particularly in relation to the construction of meaning. Layered compositions deliberately obfuscate, with fragments of newsprint and text embedded in the dense “Net-Grid” paintings and phrases or words hidden in the “Windows” compositions. El-Sayegh remains mindful of the potential for systems of categorization to tip over into prejudice or violence, the regulation and management of human beings under certain regimes, and the pathologization of difference. Indebted to the anti-taxonomical and the nonsensical, El-Sayegh creates her work as spaces where the dominant modes of creating meaning can be broken down and new forms of meaning can materialize.
Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 536 West 22 Street, New York, Duration: 8/11-22/12/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com
