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MANDY El-Sayegh
About the Artist
Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985, Selangor, Malaysia) was exposed to artistic practice from a young age: her father worked as a calligrapher for the Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi before moving to London.
To this day, El-Sayegh’s work references and engages with her father’s calligraphy, placing it in conversation with her own. Her sources of inspiration also range from a plethora of incomplete pieces of literature, lifted from newspapers, books and magazines, to the facets of her own multicultural identity.
Currently living and working in London, El-Sayegh obtained her BA in mixed media fine art from the University of Westminster, London, in 2007. This was followed in 2009 by an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art, London. She is known for her paintings, as well as installations and sound works that explore political, economic and social issues.
The artist uses collage and mixed media, amalgamating fragments of news and painterly gestures to express the overflow of consumption and malaise regarding the political sphere in contemporary life. For her first solo exhibition in London in 2019 – Cite Your Sources at the Chisenhale Gallery – she adorned the gallery walls with pages from The Financial Times, figures from anatomical textbooks and her own gestural marks and calligraphy. Through these broken-up and multi-layered elements, El-Sayegh interrogated not only systems of image production and circulation, but also notions of abjection within both her own artistic practice and society.
Mandy El - Sayegh. Photo: Abtin Eshraghi
© the artist Courtesy the artist
WORKS IN THE COLLECTION
Mandy El-Sayegh, "White Grounds (c-major)", 2021
Oil on linen with mixed media, 118 x 104 cm
Courtesy the artist and Thaddaeus Ropac
In White Grounds (c-major), handwritten text and archival clippings are pieced together to create a dialogue deliberately obscured from the viewer with superimposed images, smudges and broken paragraphs. The artist has added layers of white impasto to create a bandaged effect, evocative of healing and the body.
El-Sayegh’s restrained and carefully considered use of tonal variation in this work straddles the realms of colourful abstraction and monochromatic minimalism. Through her expert understanding of symmetry and geometry, she challenges the confines of the canvas in a unique manner: a prominent part is left bare and filled instead with inferred meaning, contemplation and symbolism.