Mandy El-Sayegh’s Provocative ‘Figure One’ Exhibition Review of her solo show . (This link opens in a new tab).

By Nena Hawke

(...) Enigmatically titled Figure One, it encompasses painting (of course), as well as sound and multimedia, comprised of twenty new works from her recent Net-Grid, White Grounds and Piece Paintings series’. Eerily inspired by the layout of forensic pathology books (...), it is intended to be viewed as a kind of fragmented, or broken body. On her canvases, El-Sayegh takes the contemporary media (news headlines, adverts, etc from Le Monde, Le Figaro, the Financial Times), and drops them into uncomfortable dialogue with one another and with history – to wit, the sinisterly blithe titles of Israeli military operations like Susannah and Sea Breeze placed alongside both fashion editorials and poems by the 18th/19th Century noted pacifist/humanist William Blake. (...)