The artistic impulse feels like an urgent one. [...] It comes from this fear of erasure and wanting to preserve a type of history in a medium that can be looked after. So if I smuggle in those fragments and put it in a dominant tongue, it can be looked after [...] That is the hope.

(Mandy El-Sayegh)

Thaddaeus Ropac London is pleased to present Jewel tones, an immersive, site-specific exhibition by Mandy El-Sayegh, coinciding with London Gallery Weekend. Featuring a new body of paintings, installation and performance, the exhibition explores the machinations of consumerism and perceptions of luxury in the contemporary world.

Known for her use of print and digital media as source material, El-Sayegh has in recent years created works that examine the collision of dissonant realities in published matter: between the reportage of violent geopolitical events on the one hand, and the promotion of luxury goods on the other. These juxtapositions appear side by side in the newspapers she collects, collages and silkscreens into her paintings, where advertisements for diamonds sit next to headlines reporting on unfolding wars and humanitarian crises.

Through material processes of layering, fragmentation and assemblage, El-Sayegh considers not only the proliferation of this information, but also the unseen networks of influence and capital through which it circulates.