Mandy El-Sayegh’s Provocative ‘Figure One’ Exhibition Review of her solo show

By Nena Hawke

(...) Enigmatically titled Figure One, it encompasses painting (of course), as well as sound and multimedia, comprised of twenty new works from her recent Net-Grid, White Grounds and Piece Paintings series’. Eerily inspired by the layout of forensic pathology books (...), it is intended to be viewed as a kind of fragmented, or broken body. On her canvases, El-Sayegh takes the contemporary media (news headlines, adverts, etc from Le Monde, Le Figaro, the Financial Times), and drops them into uncomfortable dialogue with one another and with history – to wit, the sinisterly blithe titles of Israeli military operations like Susannah and Sea Breeze placed alongside both fashion editorials and poems by the 18th/19th Century noted pacifist/humanist William Blake. (...)