Mandy El-Sayegh @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - The Amateur

Mandy El-Sayegh: The Amateur 

Lehmann Maupin, New York 

March 31 – April 29, 2023 

Lehmann Maupin presents an exhibition of new work by Mandy El-Sayegh. Featuring painting, sound, video, installation, and live elements, this visually and materially rich exhibition explores the curious experience of being an artist in the studio. Through a variety of media, Mandy El-Sayegh invites visitors into this interior world, seeking to activate material through chance encounters and opening up the gallery space to collaboration. A program of events will take place throughout the run of exhibition, including an immersive installation, a talk by the artist and open access opportunities for dancers to use the gallery as a rehearsal space. The exhibition’s title, The Amateur, points to the artist's interest in how a coded language and framing of professionalism supposedly confers legitimacy on creative acts of various kinds. With an emphasis on participation, Mandy El-Sayegh embraces amateurism, a moniker whose etymology, the Latin amare, suggests one who engages in something out of love.

The exhibition features new large-scale paintings, many of which are from a recent series by Mandy El-Sayegh that utilizes an abundance of blood-red pigment combined with found elements such as newspaper pages and her father’s Arabic calligraphy. These “fragments,” often seen within the artist’s densely layered compositions, are particularly stark and apparent. Also seen in the paintings on view are figurative passages reproduced from anatomical reference books. These motifs, which appear frequently in Mandy El-Sayegh’s work, are, for the artist, a symbolic re-introduction of the body into the abstract. Trapped within the paintings’ schema, sometimes by the form of a grid (which evokes a net or a crosshair) these splintered bodies also refer to the idea of suppressed subjects, denied individuality, wholeness, and representation.

The idea of this suppression is also hinted at by the inclusion in some works of a reproduced watermark from a childhood passport belonging to the artist’s brother, as a displaced Palestinian. The intention of the watermark is to prevent reproducibility, but Mandy El-Sayegh renders the mark repeatedly through silk-screening. The imperfect repetition created by this process alludes to the gradual writing out of a people from history. Also included are reproductions of currency – silk-screened dollars and counterfeit banknotes. Selected for their aesthetic appeal, as well as the inherent mechanisms of irreproducibility in authentic notes, these symbols candidly suggest the connection between art objects and commerce.

In the second gallery, a vast installation covering two large walls includes layers of finished paintings over works-in-progress: swathes of linen that are painted, screen-printed, and collaged, overlapping in a complex patchwork. These pieces feature characteristics for which the artist’s work is well known: fragments of found imagery, frequent use of red tones, and the appearance of grids silk-screened across surfaces. The installation recreates the artist’s studio, in which works are hung in layers on the walls – Mandy El-Sayegh works on multiple pieces at once, often living with works for extended periods and gradually adding what they need to be complete.

The effect in the gallery is of an immense collage, a technique which is central to Mandy El-Sayegh’s practice. The process of attempting to bind together disparate fragments into a whole functions materially as well as symbolically, connecting the philosophical, the psychological, and political worlds. The emphasis on collage techniques can be seen throughout the exhibition, in video and sound, paintings, and in acts of collaboration – which Mandy El-Sayegh also views as a form of living collage.

A new sound work, created by the artist with her frequent collaborator, composer Lily Oakes, permeates the galleries. The piece features samples including voice-notes sent by Mandy El-Sayegh to friends, and outtakes from an interview recorded in 2020 in which she haltingly introduces herself and her work. For Mandy El-Sayegh, this reflects her own ambivalent relationship with framing herself as an artist to the outside world.

As well as physically constructing a studio space, the exhibition seeks to unravel the experience of creativity and invite direct participation in this experience. Mandy El-Sayegh often paints during the night and at times experiences what she refers to as a “flow state,” which she sees as universal – a state of euphoria one might experience while dancing in a club, for example –  a common experience or “connective tissue” between human beings. For the show’s opening, in a new performance work, Akathisia, El-Sayegh activates the installation by going through the same motions she performs in her own studio – moving intuitively in front of paintings-in-progress. This activation is a gesture that challenges the mythology around the figure of the artist, revealing the ultimate simplicity of standing in front of a painting while at the same time alluding to the intimacy and possibility of the studio. The movements are accompanied by projections featuring quick cuts between shots of studio processes along with snippets of current news and forensic pathology sources. The movements in the performance (and its title) refer to akathisia, a nervous condition Mandy El-Sayegh experienced in 2020. Connected to dopamine imbalance, akathisia produces a feeling of restlessness or jitteriness, and an inability to stay still. This restless movement also mirrors the multitude of imagery within the works and their perpetual state of fluid, internal flux.

For Mandy El-Sayegh, movement has become a means by which the living body is brought back into her art, and she has worked with collaborative performance for several years, usually within her exhibitions, by interacting with installations, works on gallery floors, and projections. For this exhibition, the artist invites others to inhabit the space, and has issued an open call for dancers to use the gallery to rehearse or improvise throughout the run of the show. These interventions connect with the methodologies Mandy El-Sayegh employs throughout her practice – the “cut-up” method, pulling together material from different sources, as well as experimentations that invite chance occurrences.

Through inhabiting the gallery as a living space, Mandy El-Sayegh resists the static framework in which her works typically appear outside of her studio. Isolating herself by listening to music on headphones, while the audience hears her sound piece, she plays with the dichotomy between the separation of the artist in the studio and the collective experience of the work that can occur when art is brought into public spaces.

LEHMANN MAUPIN

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

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Mandy El-Sayegh @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul - Protective Inscriptions

Mandy El-Sayegh: Protective Inscriptions

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

May 20 – July 17, 2021

Lehmann Maupin Seoul presents Protective Inscriptions, an exhibition of new work by London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh, whose practice reflects the fractured nature of communication, knowledge, and identity. Adapting elements of psychoanalysis within a formal aesthetic, Mandy El-Sayegh investigates the body as a site of cultural rupture, linguistic entropy, and mutated meaning. “I’m interested in this idea of lost time and the impossibility of finding a moment of origin,” states Mandy El-Sayegh, “My work builds fragmented histories into absurdist bodies and forms.” The artist’s first solo exhibition in Seoul, Protective Inscriptions features an immersive installation, combining painting and soundscape to activate a formless language of flesh and vibration.

For this exhibition, Mandy El-Sayegh has created a skin of unstretched canvases that wraps the walls of the gallery, overlaid with a new suite of Net-Grid paintings. A continuation of the artist’s ongoing Net-Grid series (begun in 2013), this installation offers insight into the method of their making. Created through the assemblage of material and overlaid with hand-painted grids, these works represent the process of trapping, distilling, and retaining information, capturing both intended meaning and happenstance associations. Beneath each clean, schematic exterior lies a bruised surface that evokes wounded flesh. This dense material layering is echoed in the accompanying sound work, which reverberates throughout the space, breathing and vibrating in a low hum. Here, Mandy El-Sayegh’s dense red grids, intense layers of color, and aural environment work in tandem to create a visceral experience that is both bodily and cerebral.

Drawing on the Buddhist idea of the nine stages of decomposition, Mandy El-Sayegh infuses each painting with interstices and flesh-like pigment that represent an ambiguous process, the direction of which (towards healing or towards decay) is deliberately obscured. Here, Mandy El- Sayegh’s grid becomes a protective sheath, a girdle holding the damaged tissue of the body together. In one painting, transliterated cut script, Mandy El-Sayegh draws on traditional Buddhist woodblock prints, which were often printed on rice paper and worn on the body as a talisman for protection. This work is composed of layers of blue, red, and green pigment, combined with silk- screened images of a Buddhist print, the artist’s father’s calligraphy, Financial Times articles, muslin, and surgical gauze. A self-harm injury, referred to as dermatitis artefacta―a deliberate self-infliction of lesions—is carefully rendered, and is the only hand-painted element in transliterated cut script apart from the grid itself. The piece draws on a specific woodblock print that appears throughout, featuring the eight-armed Bodhisattva Mahapratisara in the center surrounded by the dharani (Buddhist mantra), 33 ritual objects of esoteric Buddhism, mudras, and Bodhisattvas on lotus pedestals.

The soundscape, chalk, is inspired by Buddha Machines―small portable chanting devices used to aid in prayer and meditation. A collaboration with composer Lily Oakes, chalk layers sounds from disparate sources. It pulses through the body, activating a vibration that engages the senses in the act of looking, observing, and experiencing. The work is composed of ambient and industrial sound, bells, electronic music, and chanting. The layering process in chalk echoes the material and historical layering of Mandy El-Sayegh’s practice, in which she weaves together dislocated fragments from her own history, crafting them into an organic system, or body. The visual and auditory compositions in Protective Inscriptions deliberately confuse any defined order or interpretation. Mandy El-Sayegh leaves analysis open, remaining mindful of the potential for systems of categorization to tip over into prejudice or violence, or lead to the pathologization of difference. Indebted to the anti-taxonomical and the nonsensical, Mandy El-Sayegh’s Protective Inscriptions creates a space where dominant modes of meaning-making can be broken down and reimagined.

MANDY EL-SAYEGH (born in 1985, Malaysia; lives in London) received her BFA in 2007 from the University of Westminster, London, followed by her MFA in painting in 2011 from the Royal College of Art, London. Solo exhibitions of Mandy El-Sayegh’s work have been organized at the Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon (2019); Bétonsalon, Paris, France (2019); Chisenhale Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2019); The Mistake Room, Guadalajara, Mexico (2018); and Carl Kostyál, London, United Kingdom (2017). She has been featured in various group exhibitions including Searching the Sky for Rain, Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY (2019); Ecologies of Darkness, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Germany (2019); Deterioro y Poder, Instituto de Vision, Bogota, Colombia (2018); Lessons in Agronomy, Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China (2017); Boundary Work, Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2017); Room Services (with Oscar Murillo and Yutaka Sone), New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2016); For Pete’s Sake, Carl Kostyál, Stockholm, Sweden (2016); Elizabeth House, Elizabeth House, London, United Kingdom (2011); Responsive Eye, London Gallery West, London, United Kingdom (2011); and RCA Painting Degree Show, Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom (2011). El-Sayegh’s work is in public and private collections, including Collection Nicoletta Fiorucci Russo, London; and Start Museum, Shanghai, China. In 2017 Mandy El-Sayegh was shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery, London and was invited to participate in the Chisenhale Gallery Commissions Programme 2017–19, supported by the LUMA Foundation.

LEHMANN MAUPIN SEOUL

74-18, Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul

www.lehmannmaupin.com

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Mandy El-Sayegh @ Lehmann Maupin, Hong Kong - Dispersal

Mandy El-Sayegh: Dispersal
Lehmann Maupin, Pedder Building, Hong Kong
July 11 – August 23, 2019

MANDY EL-SAYEGH  

TBC - Piece Painting (denzel), 2019 

Oil and mixed media on linen, stainless steel artist frame 

88.58 x 59.06 inches, 225 x 150 cm 

Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul 

Lehmann Maupin announces Dispersal, an exhibition of work by London-based artist MANDY EL-SAYEGH. For the artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia, Mandy El-Sayegh presents new paintings, sculpture, and installation. Together, the works offer insight into Mandy El-Sayegh’s complex assessment of the systems—from global finance and media, to more organic and aesthetic frameworks—by which we make meaning, assign worth, and construct personal identity and culture. There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, July 11, from 6 to 8 PM at the Pedder Building.

As part of a generation coming of age at the turn of the 21st century, Mandy El-Sayegh’s artistic sensibility is informed by the fractured and diffused nature of acquiring knowledge and personal perspective amidst our globalized, information-saturated era. Her Net-Grid studies included in the exhibition visually recreate the process by which one’s psyche seeks, traps, retains, and associates information, like a fishing net cast amidst a polluted yet still fertile ocean, where it will collect both its intended catch and unsought detritus. The process by which our sensory receptors retain and translate environments, experiences, education, news, and entertainment into the internalized personal network of thought, memory, and dreams is made evident in the hazy, yet formally rigorous grid of these paintings. The paint used in Mandy El-Sayegh’s Net-Grid studies, applied in a wet-on-wet style, speaks to the mutability, layering, and absorptive nature of knowledge itself.

The artist’s sequence of latex pieces, tiled on the floor like fleshy rectangles, recreate the grid of the paintings they are shown alongside, revealing even more tiny bits of media that have been trapped in their casting. The latex installation captures Mandy El-Sayegh’s aptitude for communicating duality. Each individual unit represents a unique conceptual and material decision by the artist, however they also appear as uniform components of a larger structure, all cast from the same mold. This dichotomy is heightened by the nature of the material itself, which both preserves the properties captured in its liquid state, while simultaneously deteriorating as it ages.

The attention paid to the conceptual or metaphorical properties of her materials is again evident in the Piece Paintings that incorporate figurative imagery in surrealistic juxtapositions. These are positioned in Mandy El-Sayegh’s room sized installation that is created from a grid of the South China Morning Post applied directly to the gallery’s walls. For the artist, the use of a local newspaper, published in English, further illuminates the frameworks of nationality, culture, society, and commerce that permeate our understanding of the world and our place within it. Standing amidst her installation of news and layered imagery, Mandy El-Sayegh provides a perfect encapsulation of the globalized network experience that we engage with every day, each of us a figure amidst an expansive and intractable background of information, environment, and history.

MANDY EL-SAYEGH (born in 1985, Malaysia; lives in London) received her BFA in 2007 from the University of Westminster, London, followed by her MFA in painting in 2011 from the Royal College of Art, London. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Chisenhale Gallery, London (2019); Carl Kostyál, London (2017); The Mistake Room, Guadalajara, Mexico, (2018); and Carlos/Ishikawa, London (2016), among others. Group exhibitions and biennales featuring her work include Ecologies of Darkness, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2019); and the Sharjah Biennial 13: Tamawuj, Sharjah, UAE (2017).

LEHMANN MAUPIN HONG KONG
407 Pedder Builing, 12 Pedder Street, Central Hong Kong
www.lehmannmaupin.com