Week 2 : Day 3 21/09/23 Exhibition Visit

Mandy El-Sayegh

Interiors

Thaddaeus Ropac, London Ely House W1S 4NJ

Temporary exhibition with many of the canvases on brushed steel supports

Hanging latex curtains a work across the walls and floors enveloping the space.

Shown in this way to make the work interactive and build a relationship between gallery visitors and the artist. The work is about interiors so displaying it in this way means that there is art surrounding the visitors at all times. Visitors pass through the gallery into and out of different interiors.

Ideas of the body and mind as spaces that you can enter and explore physically. The concept of bodily disintegration and psychological experience are also explored especially through the jarring texture of the latex, mix media hanging curtains. They reflect the artist’s interest in the permeability of bodies.

El Sayegh describes Interiors as ‘the experience of being a body-in-pieces, a history-in-pieces.’

El Sayegh communicates these ideas using materials such as oils, latex, linen, canvas. She utilises silkscreens and works a lot with collage. She also uses pre-existing objects like antique rugs and vintage medical examination couches.

I really like El Sayegh’s uses of colours. She uses both pastels, creams, shades of white but also bolder blues and reds. I love the texture that is created by using latex on linen and that is very inspiring as I can imagine how changing the form of linen can be integrated into fashion and textiles or jewellery and accessories and be made into a final garment. Other than the work titled a good hang I quite like the concept of the collection Freud portable interior as it made me think. It felt very random and out of place and the objects were miscellaneous to say the least.

The rest of the work/ installations were so similar that my eyes no more than glanced over them. The only thing that intrigued me in the oil on canvas works, the White Grounds and Atlas works series, were the seemingly random pornographic images.

Research This page is part of the collection 'Part 1 '.

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