Mandy El-Sayegh

Interiors

★★☆☆☆

On until 30 September 2023

Interiors fly-posts the grand civic forms of the Ropac townhouse with sheets from the Financial Times and the Daily Mail and vast expanses of poured latex. Everything is soft and pastel. A curtain, also dipped in beige latex, isolates an oppressively-filled room. Contours of the continents are discernible underneath the rubber, alongside fragmented of headlines. A cacophonous narrative, an equally discordant video collage. Upstairs, the forms devour the walls, too. Some worn-out carpets compete with another soundtrack. The eye longs for the calmer view outside.

El-Sayegh says she wanted to replicate Freud’s consulting room and her studio. But for the abundance of material, there simply aren’t enough ideas in the exhibition to go around these Mayfair halls. The show thus looks like a hurried response (all works dated 2023) to a gap (four weeks) in the schedule. Sometimes, access to the resources of a mega-gallery is a curse. By contrast, El-Sayegh’s restrained 2019 Chisenhale exhibition was far more ambitious.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Joseph Awuah-Darko, How is your day going? at Ed Cross ★★☆☆☆

Joseph Awuah-Darko

How is your day going?

★★☆☆☆

This project relies on layers of gimmicks and, sadly, they show through Awuah-Darko’s thick palette knife impasto.

Harmony Korine, Aggressive Dr1fter Part II at Hauser & Wirth ★★☆☆☆

Harmony Korine

Aggressive Dr1fter Part II

★★☆☆☆

The garish colours which may have carried the story in cinema here are unfitting of their new medium.

Christopher Aque, Alexandre Khondji at Sweetwater and Studio M ★★★★★

Christopher Aque, Alexandre Khondji

★★★★★

Aesthetic cognition or crossword puzzles only rarely bring such perverse pleasure.

Alvaro Barrington, Grandma’s Land at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Alvaro Barrington

Grandma’s Land

★★★☆☆

The party slumps into a half-voiced political complaint and never recovers. This is what happens when instead of living culture, we ‘celebrate’ it.

Patricia Ferguson, Each Little Scar at FILET ★★★★☆

Patricia Ferguson

Each Little Scar

★★★★☆

No medium is better suited to anxiety and dread.

Jasper Marsalis,  \m/’ at Emalin ★★★★☆

Jasper Marsalis

\m/'

★★★★☆

The circus is in town, its acts are the infrastructure of contentment.

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