Mandy El-Sayegh’s Compellingly Complex Works Will Star At Art Basel Hong Kong

Mandy El-Sayegh b. 1985, Malaysia Follow +

A focused installation by London-based artist Mandy El-Sayegh will take over the Kabinett section of Lehmann Maupin’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong later this month.

Two new works, Net-Grid Study (Blood Opal) and Net-Grid Study (Wish States) (both 2026), are created in oil and acrylic on canvas, with hand-painted, silkscreened and collage elements, including newspaper clippings, adverts, banknotes and stock market reports.

Overlaid with grids, El-Sayegh’s works operate on the fringe of legibility and obfuscation, combining disparate elements that create visual riddles, drawing the viewer in with conflicting figure-ground dynamics.

“I don’t throw anything away,” El-Sayegh has said, discussing the creation of her dense montages. “It’s more like hoarding than collecting.”

The artist described her grids as “a way of holding everything together so it doesn’t overflow”. She added: “It’s also such a robust motif.”

The works heading to Hong Kong from 27–29 March are part of the artist’s ongoing Net-Grid Study series, earlier iterations of which have received institutional acclaim (one is now held in the Tate’s collection).

In a recent interview with Louisiana Channel, the YouTube channel from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, the artist described the “broken syntax” in her upbringing.

Born to a Malaysian mother and Palestinian father, she discussed her experiences of migration and internal and external pressures around ambition and expectation.

“I think it’s something about language not being satisfactory and you are kind of unconsciously building a language out of necessity,” El-Sayegh said of her practice.

The artist’s presentation is part of Lehmann Maupin’s booth in Kabinett, Art Basel’s dedicated sector for curated solo presentations of modern and contemporary artists. Lehmann Maupin is one of 35 galleries showing in the section, while overall, 240 galleries will head to Hong Kong for the fair.

Elsewhere at Art Basel, Lehmann Maupin will showcase new and existing works by artists from Asia and its diaspora, including Do Ho Suh, Kim Yun Shin, Tammy Nguyen, Liu Wei and Anna Park.

Meanwhile in South Korea, El-Sayegh is concurrently presenting a solo show at Seoul’s Space K, For Theresa, on view from 19 March–21 June 2026. It follows recent solo exhibitions at The Depot at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam earlier this year and Kummelholmen in Stockholm last year.