Burning Square: Mandy El-Sayegh
— The Arts Club Dubai 14 April — 20 September 2025

Burning Square: works by Mandy El-Sayegh presents a selection of large-scale paintings by the London-based artist from her celebrated Blessings series (2023).

The display features three works – Burning Square (Jude) (2024), Net-Grid Study (Time Capture 13.11.23) (2023), and Burning Square: Free from I – and each sheds light on El-Sayegh’s multifaceted practice, which examines the layering and fragmentation of cultural, political, and social structures. By integrating elements such as newsprint, advertising imagery, anatomical drawings, aerial maps, and fragments of her father’s calligraphy with gestural painting, she explores the intersections of language, materiality, and the human body.

A central theme in El-Sayegh’s practice is the relationship between fragments and the whole. By layering and repositioning visual and textual materials, she investigates how meaning is shaped through accumulation and context.

El-Sayegh reconfigures the Modernist grid—traditionally associated with order and rationality—into both a structuring and obscuring device. In Burning Square: Free from I and Net-Grid Study (Time Capture 13.11.23), layered grids interact with cultural fragments, challenging ideas of authority and legitimacy while exposing the power structures that shape perception and value. Frequently incorporating the distinctive, flesh-toned pages of the Financial Times, she draws on its global financial connotations to reinforce the corporeal themes within her work.

The Blessings series, to which Burning Square: Free from I and Burning Square (Jude) belong, originates from Chinese blessing scrolls crafted by El-Sayegh’s uncle, a calligrapher. Initially collaged onto the paintings, these scrolls were later replaced with gold leaf squares, referencing the tradition of burning joss paper as offerings in Chinese ancestral rituals. Within El-Sayegh’s practice, these “burning squares” serve as both protective symbols and markers of historical erasure. In times of instability, archives are frequently altered, fragmented, or destroyed to reinforce dominant narratives. Within her work, the gold square becomes a vessel for these lost or suppressed histories—an archive that, like memory itself, is in constant flux.

The presentation at The Arts Club Dubai offers audiences an opportunity to engage with Mandy El-Sayegh’s distinctive visual language, which merges material experimentation, abstraction, and critical inquiry into a thought-provoking exploration of perception and meaning.