Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce a joint exhibition featuring London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh, and Seoul-based artist Lee Bul. Spanning two generations, both artists are known for their highly process-driven practices that often engage the human body through an exploration of materiality, science, literature, and medical technology. This exhibition will feature work from Lee Bul's Perdu series and El-Sayegh’s recent Proofs series. While the Perdu series explores the binary of the technological and the organic, investigating the disruption of the natural by the artificial, El-Sayegh's Proofs series examines the fragmented nature of human identification through the use of medical illustrations, imprints of the artist’s own body, and cultural and personal ephemera. Lee Bul’s work is the subject of a major solo exhibition Lee Bul: Saved Utopia at Manege Central Exhibition Hall, Saint Petersburg, Russia, while El-Sayegh’s work will be included in the upcoming exhibition British Art Show 9, organized by Hayward Gallery Touring, opening in 2021 in Wolverhampton, UK.

Born in the 1960s in South Korea under the country’s military dictatorship, Lee Bul came of age during a period of social and economic upheaval marked by the transition to a democratic state. The political shift experienced during her lifetime has informed much of her work and has been expressed in various ongoing themes, forms and materials over the course of her career, drawing inspiration from numerous literary, cinematic, and architectural sources. In her most recent Perdu paintings, composed of organic and inorganic material such as mother of pearl and layers of acrylic paint, the artist’s otherworldly visions of fragmented cyborg bodies are seemingly caught, suspended in space, at various distances and in differing detail. In Perdu LXIX (2020) the undefined forms emerge from a brightly-hued yellow field as if proliferating or expanding, hinting at an unidentified form of life that looms between the biological and technologic. The unfinished state of the forms and overall theme of physical and metaphorical yearning for completeness in the Perdu works is rooted in these past iterations where anagrams, like cyborgs, are formed from reconfigurable parts.