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Mandy El-Sayegh
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Malaysia
Biography
Mandy El-Sayegh is a Malaysian-British contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, collage , installation, video, performance, and sound. She lives and works in London. A graduate of the University of Westminster with a BA in Mixed Media Fine Art (2007) and the Royal College of Art with an MA in Painting (2009), she develops a rigorous conceptual body of work that interrogates language systems, sociopolitical structures, memory, the body, and the mechanisms of representation. Her approach is based on a "part-to-whole relationship" methodology, assembling fragments—newspaper clippings, maps, texts, anatomical drawings, family archives—to create layered pictorial surfaces and immersive installations where meaning remains unstable and constantly reconstructed.
Influenced by her multicultural heritage – a mother of Chinese-Malaysian origin and a Palestinian father who was a calligrapher – she frequently incorporates Arabic script, calligraphic gesture, and the notion of repetition as formal and conceptual tools. Her work engages with references ranging from linguistics to psychoanalysis, and is part of a reflection on fragmentation, diasporic identity, and cultural transmission.
She has presented major solo exhibitions, including Cite Your Sources at Chisenhale Gallery in 2019, her first large-scale institutional exhibition, as well as several exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin in New York, Seoul, and London. She has also exhibited at Lawrie Shabibi, notably with A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose in 2024. Her work has been featured in international events such as the Sharjah Biennial 13, the British Art Show 9, and the Busan Biennale.
Her works are featured in prestigious public and private collections, including the Tate, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Sharjah Art Foundation, and Kadist. She was shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2017 and nominated for the Prix Jean-François Prat in 2023, confirming her international recognition. Through her experimental and analytical practice, Mandy El-Sayegh has established herself as a major figure in contemporary conceptual painting, exploring the tensions between image, text, and power in an information-saturated world.
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