Mandy El-Sayegh Jewel Tones

Jewel Tones is an immersive, site-specific exhibition that features a new body of paintings, installation and performance, exploring the machinations of consumerism and perceptions of luxury in the contemporary world.

 

Known for her use of print and digital media as source material, El-Sayegh has in recent years created works that examine the collision of dissonant realities in published matter: between the reportage of violent geopolitical events on the one hand, and the promotion of luxury goods on the other. These juxtapositions appear side by side in the newspapers she collects, collages and silkscreens into her paintings, where advertisements for diamonds sit next to headlines reporting on unfolding wars and humanitarian crises. Through material processes of layering, fragmentation and assemblage, El-Sayegh considers not only the proliferation of this information, but also the unseen networks of influence and capital through which it circulates.

Watch the artist discuss the exhibition

Play

Pause

In Jewel Tones, the artist examines luxury as both an aesthetic and affective experience, co-opting its visual and cultural codes in order to slip veiled fragments of political reality into a space associated with exclusivity, beauty and aspiration. Luxury becomes a strategy of bypass and circumvention, allowing El-Sayegh to insert allusions to political unrest into the aesthetic cues used by private members’ clubs and high-end department stores to cultivate desire. Incorporating glass chandeliers, upholstered furniture, Tiffany-blue walls, antique rugs and mirrors, alongside a sound work produced by Lily Oakes featuring sensuous recordings of leather and other luxury materials, the artist transforms the gallery into an enticing yet paranoiac environment in which complex and unsettling truths lie beneath shimmering, jewel-toned surfaces.

 

 

Thaddaeus Ropac · Mandy El-sayegh, Jewel Tones (2026)

Net-Grid (Quinacridone Opal), 2026
Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements
190 x 276 cm (74.8 x 108.67 in)

Enquire

Net-Grid (Quinacridone Opal), 2026 Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements 190 x 276 cm (74.8 x 108.67 in)

Net-Grid (Aquamarine and Lavender Opal), 2026
Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements
190 x 130 cm (74.8 x 51.18 in)

Enquire

Net-Grid (Aquamarine and Lavender Opal), 2026 Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements 190 x 130 cm (74.8 x 51.18 in)

Net-Grid (Fire Opal-Citrine), 2026
Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements
190 x 130 cm (74.8 x 51.18 in)

Enquire

Net-Grid (Fire Opal-Citrine), 2026 Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements 190 x 130 cm (74.8 x 51.18 in)

Net-Grid (Fire Opal-Jade), 2026
Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements
190 x 130 cm (74.8 x 51.18 in)

Enquire

Net-Grid (Fire Opal-Jade), 2026 Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements 190 x 130 cm (74.8 x 51.18 in)

Net-Grid (Fire Opal-Turquoise), 2026
Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements
190 x 130 cm (74.8 x 51.18 in)

Enquire

Net-Grid (Fire Opal-Turquoise), 2026 Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements 190 x 130 cm (74.8 x 51.18 in)

El-Sayegh unravels the dichotomy between consumption and production through two distinct spaces – the interior gallery room and the outside hallway. The exhibition begins by staging El-Sayegh’s artistic process, inviting viewers to consider more broadly the mechanics of image production. In the first-floor landing, a series of printing screens – including those used to create the new body of paintings – are hung salon-style. The screens foreground the relationship between medium and message, introducing the exhibition’s wider concern with how systems of mass production strip images of their affective power.

Compositional, 2026
Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements
168 x 160 cm (66.14 x 62.99 in)

Enquire

Compositional, 2026 Oil and acrylic on canvas with silkscreened elements 168 x 160 cm (66.14 x 62.99 in)

Aquamarine Constellation, 2026
19 Printing screens
Dimensions variable 

Enquire

Aquamarine Constellation, 2026 19 Printing screens Dimensions variable

Along the hallway, a sculptural constellation of El-Sayegh’s Metabolism works function as time capsules, gathering visual references and material residues including vodka bottles repurposed to hold painters’ spirits in the studio, paintbrushes and rags alongside ritual offerings such as candles. These quasiarchives – held in freestanding, repurposed vitrines previously used for works by Joseph Beuys – conflate multiple modes of display, from museological, forensic and commercial to devotional. While they index the alchemical fuel for the conception of the exhibition, they also point to the highly curated associative logic of phantasmatic desire, that lends itself to veneration and fetishisation of notions of authenticity – be that of the archive, the figure of the artist, or the commodity. Nearby, Compositional (2026) assembles remnants of several earlier paintings into a composite work. Collaged within it are era-defining media images – a photograph documenting torture at Abu Ghraib, Donald Trump on the cover of Time magazine and newspaper clippings reporting on Gaza dated 9th October 2023 – set against warm yellow tones that signify both canary diamonds and bodily waste.

Metabolism (Opal/Citrine/Grapefruit), 2026
Oak and glass vitrine table with artist objects
164.6 x 83.5 x 53.5 cm (64.8 x 32.87 x 21.06 in)

Enquire

Metabolism (Opal/Citrine/Grapefruit), 2026 Oak and glass vitrine table with artist objects 164.6 x 83.5 x 53.5 cm (64.8 x 32.87 x 21.06 in)

Metabolism (Garnet/Aqua/Amber), 2026
Oak and glass vitrine table with artist objects
180 x 82 x 50 cm (70.87 x 32.28 x 19.67 in)

Enquire

Metabolism (Garnet/Aqua/Amber), 2026 Oak and glass vitrine table with artist objects 180 x 82 x 50 cm (70.87 x 32.28 x 19.67 in)

Metabolism (Verdigris/Merlot/Abalone), 2026
Oak and glass vitrine table with artist objects
166.6 x 83.5 x 53.5 cm (65.59 x 32.87 x 21.06 in)

Enquire

Metabolism (Verdigris/Merlot/Abalone), 2026 Oak and glass vitrine table with artist objects 166.6 x 83.5 x 53.5 cm (65.59 x 32.87 x 21.06 in)

About the artist

Portrait of Mandy El-Sayegh. Photo: Abtin Eshraghi.

Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985, Malaysia) lives and works in London. She received her BA in Fine Art from the University of Westminster in 2007 and her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2009. Her first institutional solo show, the specially commissioned installation Cite Your Sources, took place at Chisenhale Gallery, London, in 2019. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at The Arts Club, London (2026); Space K, Seoul (2026); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2025); The Showroom, London (2025); Art Basel Parcours (2024); Overbeck-Gesellschaft - Kunstverein Lübeck (2023); Tichy Ocean Foundation, Zürich (2023); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023); UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles (2022); Busan Biennale (2020); Sursock Museum, Beirut (2019); SculptureCenter, Long Island City (2019); The Mistake Room, Guadalajara (2018); Instituto de Visión, Bogotá (2018); Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing (2017); and the New York Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, Queens (2016), among others. 

 

Learn more about the artist

Download the press release

In the press

Previous Next

Previous Next

Featured in British Vogue

31 May 2026

Mandy El-Sayegh: Jewel Tones

This Summer’s Essential Contemporary Art Shows

Mandy El-Sayegh features in Vogue's edit of the best art to see in Britain this summer.

Featured in Frieze

1 July 2026

Mandy El-Sayegh Catalogues Catastrophe

Exhibition review

At Thaddaeus Ropac, London, the artist’s paintings and prints collapse luxury, war and financial imagery into a system of classification...