Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Dispersal, an exhibition of work by London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh. For the artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia, El-Sayegh will present new paintings, sculpture, and installation. Together, the works offer insight into El-Sayegh’s complex assessment of the systems—from global finance and media, to more organic and aesthetic frameworks—by which we make meaning, assign worth, and construct personal identity and culture. There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, July 11, from 6 to 8 PM at the Pedder Building.

As part of a generation coming of age at the turn of the 21st century, El-Sayegh’s artistic sensibility is informed by the fractured and diffused nature of acquiring knowledge and personal perspective amidst our globalized, information-saturated era. Her Net-Grid studies included in the exhibition visually recreate the process by which one’s psyche seeks, traps, retains, and associates information, like a fishing net cast amidst a polluted yet still fertile ocean, where it will collect both its intended catch and unsought detritus. The process by which our sensory receptors retain and translate environments, experiences, education, news, and entertainment into the internalized personal network of thought, memory, and dreams is made evident in the hazy, yet formally rigorous grid of these paintings. The paint used in El-Sayegh’s Net-Grid studies, applied in a wet-on-wet style, speaks to the mutability, layering, and absorptive nature of knowledge itself.