Mandy El-Sayegh's works acquired by Tate

Two works by Mandy El-Sayegh, Net-Grid (my dad knows nothing) (2020) and Floor (aka 'Figured Ground') (2020), have recently been acquired by Tate for their permanent collection, with funds provided by Simon Nixon and family. 

In her Net-Grid paintings, Mandy El-Sayegh overlays newsprint from the Financial Times, found objects and silkscreen prints with hand-painted grids to consider the pervasive circulation of images and information as well as the structures that contain them. El-Sayegh’s use of newspaper is a methodology borrowed from her father, who does calligraphy exercises on tabloid scraps or cereal boxes: ‘He's not thinking about the meaning that's being created, but the meaning is being created through the chance encounter of surface.’ A similar associative logic is at work in her Net-Grids, through the dense layering of text and images that take on new meanings through their proximity. Newspapers are themselves already a form of collage, a ‘sedimentation of time and matter, physically and theoretically, pulp, ink and information’. El-Sayegh uses the Financial Times for ‘its specific formal and conceptual particularities’ and its stature as ‘the known and “trusted” British version of the “ground” of global economic objectivity’. It is precisely this perceived objectivity that is brought into question in her paintings, where words and images are set adrift from their conventional structures to take on new and unexpected meanings.