Mandy El-Sayegh Piece Painting (Sotheby’s Richter IV), 2023

Acrylic, mixed media and digital print on canvas

160 x 120 cm (63 x 47.25 in)

Belonging to the artist’s Piece Paintings series, in which hand-printed fragments of image and text are assembled on canvases overlaid with gestural streaks of paint, this work unites Mandy El-Sayegh’s preoccupation with transformative bodily states and her critique of art-historical narratives. An enlarged reproduction of a page from a Sotheby’s auction catalogue extends across the pictorial plane of the work, featuring an early example of German artist Gerhard Richter’s celebrated paintings of magnified brushstrokes. El-Sayegh has previously referenced the work of Richter, alongside that of Mark Rothko and other white, male European and American abstract artists, juxtaposing these citations with confrontational bodily interventions, such as the smears of red and green paint in the present work that evoke a sense of blood and bruising. Loosely echoing the lines articulated in Richter’s paintings printed beneath, through the hand- painted elements El-Sayegh asks ‘who is permitted to enter the space of abstraction [and] which subject positions are marginalised in the process?’

Mandy El-Sayegh will have her first solo presentation in Switzerland from 9 June to 20 August 2023 at Tichy Ocean Foundation, Zürich, following her solo exhibition, Enfleshing, presented at Overbeck-Gesellschaft and St. Petri Church, Lübeck earlier this year.