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:

Terry Winters: Along the River at Modern Art ★★★★★

Terry Winters

Along the River

★★★★★

A creationist science born out of oil.

A light here required a shadow at Maximillian William ★★★☆☆

Grant Falardeau, Rimantė Mikulovičiūtė, Benjamin Sasserson, Bu Shi, Dylan Williams

A light here required a shadow

★★★☆☆

Catch the wrong end of the spectrum and forever remain obscured.

Slawn at Saatchi Yates ★★☆☆☆

Slawn

★★☆☆☆

Do you like KAWS but find him too expensive?

Alex Katz, Spring at Timothy Taylor ★★☆☆☆

Alex Katz

Spring

★★☆☆☆

The emperor’s clothes have moth holes.

Jan Gatewood, Group Relations at Rose Easton ★☆☆☆☆

Jan Gatewood

Group Relations

★☆☆☆☆

Such thin metaphors could only have come from LA.

Tarek Lakhrissi, Spit at Nicoletti ★★★☆☆

Tarek Lakhrissi

Spit

★★★☆☆

Writing poetry is hard enough.

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