Mandy El-Sayegh Catalogues Catastrophe Exhibition review
By Sabo Kpade
In her latest solo exhibition, ‘Jewel Tones’, Mandy El-Sayegh demonstrates that catastrophe and luxury are bedfellows. A practice of classification underlies the exhibition, which contains silkscreen frames, objects in vitrines and El-Sayegh’s signature collaged and painted prints on canvas. The first segment of the gallery is painted entirely in robin’s egg-blue, with 10 printing frames mounted salon-style (Aquamarine Constellation, all works 2026). Together, the images appear as a matrix of consumerism, introducing advertisements for high-end brands, the US dollar bill and pages from The Financial Times.
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The central wall in the final room is plastered with sepia-toned prints, on which three screen-printed canvases from the ‘Net-Grid’ series (2026) hang low to the ground, while the adjacent walls retain the blue of the first gallery. The backdrop includes positive versions of images first raised in the viewer’s mind in Aquamarine Constellation. No image is privileged over any other: a news clipping reporting on the war in Gaza sits in the same register as advertisements for Graff and Tiffany & Co., featuring diamond-clad, conventionally beautiful, white women. Here, luxury advertising shares the same material surface and symbolic weight as war reportage, collapsing commerce and conflict into a single visual field.
In the ‘Net-Grid’ paintings, El-Sayegh overlays screen-printed material from mass media with a dense lattice of repeated and cross-hatched lines that abstracts and defers the legibility of the image, making it difficult to stabilise in the viewer’s eyes and requiring sustained looking before it resolves. The juxtaposition of lush, harmonious colour with fragments of violent reality in El-Sayegh’s works recreates the distortion field of contemporary visual and digital culture, where desire and war, aspiration and geopolitical horrors occupy the same flattened plane of the continuous scroll. In another artist’s hands, the wallpaper might read as a haphazard collage. However, by abstracting and equating war reportage and luxury advertising onto the same surface, El-Sayegh posits that distortion is not incidental to contemporary life but structural to it.
