ART CITIES: London-Mandy El Sayegh

Mandy El-Sayegh works across diverse media to examine how social, cultural and political orders are formed and deconstructed in the contemporary world. In large-scale paintings, table vitrines, immersive installations, performances and videos, she collages disparate fragments of information together, interrogating the ways that meaning might emerge from the relationship between these different source materials.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery Archive

For “Interiors”, her first solo exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac in London, Mandy El-Sayegh transforms the spaces of the gallery. She intervenes with the walls and floors to create an enveloping environment within which ideas of bodily, psychological and spatial interiors play out. Featuring new large-scale paintings and installations, as well as a collaborative performance, the exhibition layers diverse materials and modes of artmaking, referencing sensorial experiences and processes of accumulation. Covering the interior of the gallery space, one installation takes inspiration from the consulting room of the renowned neurologist Sigmund Freud. Designed by Freud to be a portable interior, the contents of the room were precisely recorded so they could be restaged in a new location following the psychoanalyst’s exile from Vienna. El-Sayegh assembles objects that reference the consulting room, including Persian rugs and antique examination couches. Presented alongside walls covered with her unstretched paintings, she establishes connections between the interior spaces of Freud’s room and the installation, psychological interiorities and her own studio.  Elsewhere in the gallery, another installation builds upon El-Sayegh’s “White Grounds” series in which layered imagery of maps and detritus from the artist’s studio are partially concealed beneath white oil gesso. Skin-like latex curtains, suspended from the ceiling of the corridor leading to the gallery, draw on the artist’s enduring interest in the fragmented body, intersecting her investigation of psychological experience with ideas of embodiment and bodily disintegration.  El-Sayegh will activate this installation with a collaborative performance work, “Akathisia”, reflecting and reinterpreting inner states experienced by the artist in her studio. The performance will take place on September 12, amid the backdrop of a new sound and video work, created through visual and auditory collaging. The multimedia work intersperses footage of studio processes alongside a range of found imagery of bodies under the effects of external forces, be they harmonious or malign. The notion of corporeality is crucial in El-Sayegh’s work – she refers to her collage process as ‘suturing’ and her painted surfaces as ‘skins’. In her site-specific installations, newsprint and silkscreened texts are plastered onto the walls and floor with layers of latex that suggest medical associations or tattooed skin. The artist often incorporates the Financial Times, chosen both for its stature as an authority on global finance and the flesh-pink tone of its pages. The metaphor of the body grounds these elements in a universally recognisable register: ‘we all have bodies, regardless of our context, political leanings, and time contingencies’. However, our individual experiences within those bodies are shaped by external systems that, in turn, affect how we interpret El-Sayegh’s works.

Photo: Mandy El-Sayegh, Net-Grid (Julia Overwritten by Maher), 2021, Oil and mixed media on linen with silkscreened collaged elements, 235 x 225 cm (92.95 x 88.58 in), © Mandy El-Sayegh, Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery

Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 1-30/9/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net/