Mandy El-Sayegh Just Under the Skin
By Anna Lentchner
"There is a terror in excess," Mandy El-Sayegh told The Guardian in 2019. The London-based artist was referring to the abundance in her work, to the mass of material and symbolism that seemingly engulfs viewers of her large-scale collage-paintings. We see this in the texturally dense canvas Burning Square: prayers for rest (2023), with its streaked red background, illegible calligraphy, overlaid Palestinian keffiyeh scarf motif, silkscreened image of the United States one-hundred-dollar bill, and an Evening Standard newspaper cutout which reads "Israel pounds Gaza as the ground war looms." These elements are not personal in an obvious senseshe prefers to allude to the historical, the scientific, the cultural, the philosophical-yet buried within them is a kind of reverse selfportrait, one that, underneath its many layers, exposes the artist's innermost psyche.
El-Sayegh identifies as a "collagist," positioning this obsessive act of gathering, cutting, and layering as central to both her process and her final product. It is a dissection of imagery and language that has even extended beyond her own artmaking, to providing care for nonverbal autistic youths and working as an art therapist. She took up both roles in the years following her master's degree from the Royal College of Art in 2011, but eventually became disillusioned with government systems of social work and returned to artmaking full-time.
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The sentiment is best evidenced by her Net-Grid (2010-) series, an ongoing body of mixed-media collage-paintings for which she is primarily known. Textural, colorful, geometric, and almost overwhelmingly referential, the works assemble everything from dissected anatomy books and pornographic magazines like Hustler and Penthouse to advertisements, historical texts, and silkscreened newspaper pages. Trying to grasp their meaning can feel akin to the gnawing pulsation of a migraine, but this chaos feels intentional, or at least emblematic of their creation. In a process that El-Sayegh describes as "an assemblage of fragmented parts," the artist applies layers upon layers of material from her studio to largescale canvases, drawing from anything in her periphery—paint, latex, parts of other artworks, scraps from her arsenal of printed ephemera—until, she says, the surface becomes a "skin." When text and image have been amalgamated to the artist's liking (oftentimes, obfuscated past the point of recognition), she applies the series's titular component, a cage-like grid pattern that subsumes, disassociates, and equalizes the collaged elements' original context.
Take Net-Grid (missing eye) (2023), a two-meter, square-shaped abstraction that, from afar, appears like a strip of gauze hastily applied to a wound, barely suppressing the blood and bodily fluids seeping out of it. Buried within these large strips of mesh and bruised flesh tones, partial images and fragmented text begin to emerge: a five-pound note bearing Queen Elizabeth II's portrait, bikini-clad women, the logo for Tiffany & Co. jewelry, and, in two places, the name "SUSANNAH," in all caps. The female forms recall El-Sayegh's frequent use of anatomical and pornographic images, although it is unclear where exactly the photographs in (missing eye) originate from. More elusive is "Susannah," which, unless a viewer is familiar with her work, might seem arbitrary. But as the artist frequently disguises military operation names in her collages, "Susannah" may allude to the Mossad's failed false-flag operation of1954, when Israel attempted to undermine Egypt's populist regime by setting off bombs in civilian centers in a botched plot (the operation instead resulted in the deaths of four Jewish Egyptian recruits).
