Lehmann Maupin presents an exhibition of new work by Mandy El-Sayegh. Featuring painting, sound, video, installation, and live elements, this visually and materially rich exhibition explores the curious experience of being an artist in the studio. Through a variety of media, El-Sayegh invites visitors into this interior world, seeking to activate material through chance encounters and opening up the gallery space to collaboration. A program of events will take place throughout the run of exhibition, including an immersive installation, a talk by the artist and open access opportunities for dancers to use the gallery as a rehearsal space. The exhibition’s title, The Amateur, points to the artist's interest in how a coded language and framing of professionalism supposedly confers legitimacy on creative acts of various kinds. With an emphasis on participation, El-Sayegh embraces amateurism, a moniker whose etymology, the Latin amare, suggests one who engages in something out of love.

The exhibition features new large-scale paintings, many of which are from a recent series by El-Sayegh that utilizes an abundance of blood-red pigment combined with found elements such as newspaper pages and her father’s Arabic calligraphy. These “fragments,” often seen within the artist’s densely layered compositions, are particularly stark and apparent. Also seen in the paintings on view are figurative passages reproduced from anatomical reference books. These motifs, which appear frequently in El-Sayegh’s work, are, for the artist, a symbolic re-introduction of the body into the abstract. Trapped within the paintings’ schema, sometimes by the form of a grid (which evokes a net or a crosshair) these splintered bodies also refer to the idea of suppressed subjects, denied individuality, wholeness, and representation.