“You possibly can step on all the things,” says artist Mandy El-Sayegh, gesturing across the loft of a former glassmaking manufacturing facility in south London the place partitions and flooring are lined with layer upon layer of canvas, material and paper. Crimson paint gathers in sinister swimming pools. Throughout are screen-printed snippets of textual content. “Intercourse Assault” jumps out in crimson. “Sea Breeze” catches the eye in a color El-Sayegh calls “institutional inexperienced”. “I can’t make the work if I don’t have a multitude,” she says. “The studio is like an enormous mind actually.”
After we meet, El-Sayegh is gearing up for her present present at Thaddaeus Ropac’s London area. “I wish to convey the studio into the gallery,” she says of her immersive installations, which normally characteristic collaged partitions and flooring. “I additionally by no means know [what I’m going to do] till fairly near the present as a result of I wish to work intuitively.” It’s a breakout yr for the artist following her debut at Chisenhale gallery in 2019. This can be her third solo exhibition of 2023, following one at Lehmann Maupin in New York in April and one other in Zürich with the Tichy Ocean Basis, which continues into November. Later this month, she’s going to open a second present in London, in collaboration with Algerian-French artist Kader Attia.
At the moment, she is dressed all in black – a vest prime, paint-splattered jogging bottoms and fluffy black slippers, her mermaid-long hair coiled away from her face. Her studio – the nexus of a observe that spans portray, set up and efficiency – sits between her bed room and a library, “a chaotic archive” crammed floor-to-ceiling with inspiration, starting from pages of anatomy books to copies of the Monetary Instances, which she loves for its “fleshy tone”.
“I don’t throw something away,” she explains. “It’s extra like hoarding than gathering.” Supplies, or “fragments”, are introduced collectively in a course of she says is “like surgical procedure” – creating dense assemblages which can be collaged, screen-printed and painted over with both figurative parts or summary kinds.
The 38-year-old was born in Selangor, Malaysia. “My mum is Malaysian Chinese language and my dad is Palestinian, however they moved right here when I used to be sixish, so I’m just about a Londoner,” she says. Her mom was a midwife, her father a calligrapher – his penmanship is commonly introduced into her work – who went on to work fixing computer systems.
After graduating from the Royal Faculty of Artwork in 2011 with an MA in portray, El-Sayegh labored as a carer for younger adults with non-verbal autism for 5 years. “However due to the federal government cuts it grew to become a actually unhappy state of affairs – particularly for the service customers,” she says. “However [that job] additionally wasn’t good for me. And that was when I realised that I might solely do that.” Her works intertwine the delicate and the visceral, the private and the political, enjoying with a duality of that means. “You possibly can learn [my] work forensically, piecing collectively my story, or equally you possibly can have a look at it as summary portray,” says El-Sayegh. “I believe that me simply being right here – and the truth that my dad is from Palestine – is political.
“Irrespective of how clear I’m, there’s nonetheless going to be an enigmatic component to the work,” she provides. Nonetheless, she is completely happy to share the thought processes behind her recurring motifs. The grid steadily handpainted over her canvases is, as an example, “a method of holding all the things collectively so it doesn’t overflow. It’s additionally such a sturdy motif.” The repeated “Sea Breeze” textual content, in the meantime, is considered one of a sequence of army operation codenames – a particular reference to a raid by Israel on six civilian ships of the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” in 2010.
For Julia Peyton-Jones, curator and senior international director of Thaddaeus Ropac, the “build-up of all of the references – her private historical past, the historical past of artwork, and the world round us – is completely fascinating.” She highlights the way in which wherein El-Sayegh’s painterly palette typically resembles bruised flesh – she “offers with the bruising parts of the human expertise”.
Again in her studio, El-Sayegh picks up a medical journal from the ground. “This is an picture I used to be taking a look at yesterday; it’s an eye damage. However the colors are so stunning. It’s weirdly pacifying. It’s much less anxiety-inducing than an summary menace.” Amongst her cabinets there are additionally jars of animal elements that she and a former associate – the composer and artist Lily Oakes, with whom she continues to collaborate – used to protect in formaldehyde. “It focuses your vitality as a result of you need to be very exact. However I don’t try this any extra.”
In 2020, she suffered a breakdown. “I couldn’t cease pacing. So there was no capability to sit and paint. My work is all about breakdowns of methods and rebuilding of kind, and I assume that occurred to me in my physique and psyche.”
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From this expertise, nonetheless, got here a new observe: efficiency. Your phrases can be used in opposition to you was carried out as a part of the Frieze 2020 Reside programme. Based mostly across the idea of a mirror, it featured El-Sayegh alongside a sequence of dancers – together with her ongoing collaborator Alethia Antonia – and a soundtrack composed by Oakes. “It’s an exorcism,” she says, merely.
Her present present on the Tichy Ocean Basis is titled In Session: it’s an set up impressed by Sigmund Freud’s consulting room, with vitrines and cabinets of objects and an vintage examination sofa alongside work. A sound work, in the meantime, features a recording of considered one of El-Sayegh’s personal psychoanalysis periods. At Thaddaeus Ropac’s gallery, Freud’s examine is the place to begin for a “wealthy crimson room”, she says. “It’ll appear like my studio, super-layered, with work on prime and rugs on the ground… I need to create an oppressive psychical feeling – the thought of being inside my head.”
Currently, she’s been pondering quite a bit about cash; about how “portray is like printing cash” (considered one of her Internet-Grid work offered for £75,600 at Phillips final yr), which manifests in her canvases as collaged play cash and screen-printed financial institution notes.
Of her rising success, she says: “It makes me fairly paranoid. I thought of altering my identify to Mandy Wong – my mum’s identify.” However “it feels very significant to attain some degree of visibility from what my mother and father struggled by means of to get us [three kids] right here… From abject poverty on my mom’s aspect, I’m like bourgeoisie now,” she laughs. “I have [my own] place. I am going to a shrink. I went to artwork faculty.”
After I ask what she does exterior of constructing artwork, El-Sayegh exclaims: “Oh my God, now I’m going to should go to my shrink! The final time I finished making artwork, it wasn’t good. I don’t do the rest actually. It’s a blessing and a curse. You’re so glad that that is your life, however it doesn’t flip off, does it? As a result of the work is you.”
Interiors is at Thaddaeus Ropac, London, from 1 to 30 September, with El-Sayegh’s efficiency Akathisia on 12 September, ropac.internet. A two-person present with Kader Attia is at Lehmann Maupin, London, from 21 September to 4 November