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 sense—she prefers to allude to the historical, the scientific, the cultural, the philosophical—yet buried within them is a kind of reverse self-portrait, one that, underneath its many layers, exposes the artist’s innermost psyche.