Mandy El-Sayegh works across diverse media to examine how social, cultural and political orders are formed and deconstructed in the contemporary world. In large-scale paintings, table vitrines, immersive installations, performances and videos, she collages disparate fragments of information together, interrogating how meaning emerges through the relationship between different source materials. Her works often feature newsprint, advertisements, aerial maps, anatomy books and her father’s calligraphy alongside hand-painted elements and non-traditional materials such as latex, allowing her to move between material, corporeal and linguistic frameworks. El-Sayegh describes her process as “preoccupied with part-whole relations”, assembling diverse materials into cumulative compositions in which motifs repeat across multiple works, demonstrating how the signification of information changes when placed in new contexts.
By emphasising the boundaries of her chosen medium, El-Sayegh draws attention to the systems that determine how information is categorised, contained and understood. She creates “quasi-archives” in her table vitrines, suggesting associations through the placement of objects within a shared, delineated space. In her Net-Grid canvases, overpainted grids simultaneously structure and obscure the detritus of popular culture, referencing the primacy of the grid in Modernist art while questioning the cultural and institutional frameworks that determine how meaning is produced and legitimised. Through repetition, layering and fragmentation, her works examine the implicit power structures that shape cultural reading and interpretation.
El-Sayegh was born in Selangor, Malaysia, with roots in both Chinese and Palestinian heritage. She currently lives and works in London, where she received a BA in Fine Art from the University of Westminster in 2007, followed by an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2009.
Her first solo institutional exhibition, the specially commissioned installation Cite Your Sources, was presented at Chisenhale Gallery, London, in 2019. Her work has also been shown at Kummelholmen, Sweden (2025); BRUTUS, Rotterdam (2025); County Museum of Art Los Angeles (2023); the Tichy Ocean Foundation, Zürich; Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Lübeck; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles (2022); Busan Biennale (2020); Sursock Museum, Beirut (2019); SculptureCenter, New York (2019); Bétonsalon, Paris; 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 (2016), among others.
In 2022 her work was included in the British Art Show and the Biennale Matter of Art, Prague, and she participated in MOVE 2022 at the Centre Pompidou, presenting En Masse in collaboration with Alethia Antonia and Lily Oakes.
Mandy El-Sayegh lives and works in London.
