In Rotterdam, Mandy El-Sayegh Offers Up an Assault on the Senses

I could smell Mandy El-Sayegh’s exhibition before I could see it. Ahead of entering “Figure, Field, Grid” at Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, I watched a video of Mandy El-Sayegh, in which she discusses her love of latex. “It’s a gnarly material,” she tells the camera. “It has this dual quality of congealing and holding, but it’s also dying and falling apart. It’s an impossibility of having any beauty without its terror.” That coupling of beauty and terror aptly describes El-Sayegh’s practice; in all of her work, a dark undercurrent lies beneath initial appearances. For all its gnarly material quality, the latex throughout “Figure, Field, Grid” foregrounds its history of extraction and colonial violence. The smell of that congealed latex was palpable from down the Depot corridor in Rotterdam. When I pointed it out to a member of the gallery staff who had been installing the show for over a week, she laughed. “We’re used to it,” they responded.

Immediately on entering, it’s clear that “Figure, Field, Grid” is a multisensory show. The floor was coated in hardened latex, paint and rust, making it slightly uneven underfoot. Look up from the floor, and one sees a Frankenstein mashup of materials and histories. Huge sheets of newsprint, silkscreens, her father’s calligraphy, a copy of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy sitting under a glass display, hand-painted grids, more latex. But “Figure, Field, Grid” isn’t just about what we can see. The smell was part of the experience (even if Boijmans staff were desensitized), as was the sound, a screaming blues track playing from speakers above our heads. It was discomfiting, but for a show that tackles, among other themes, the war in Gaza and our numbed response to genocide, we can hardly expect to feel comfortable.

The name of the exhibition comes from Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay. Published in 1979, “Grids” positioned the grid as central to modern art. It has been a tool for artists since the Renaissance, but in the 20th century, the grid became a prominent feature in works by Piet Mondrian and Agnes Martin. In a different essay, Krauss articulates the “expanded field” as a way for art to transcend the traditional boundaries of painting and sculpture. El-Sayegh takes this idea and runs with it, creating “Figure, Field, Grid” as a multisensory show, something that is physically experienced rather than passively received.

For a maximalist like El-Sayegh, the grid is more than a visual tool; it offers her a way to hold thoughts together. Her interests range from the political to the psychoanalytical; from the abstractions of theory to the very real bodies of contemporary war. Grids, unsurprisingly, are found throughout the exhibition. The newsprint on the walls, the tiles on the floor, the patched fabrics hanging from the ceiling: take a step back, and you see that the room is a matrix of grids.

“Figure, Field, Grid” is the first solo show in the new Depot building of the historic Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. A precursor to the V&A Storehouse in London, the Depot revolutionized how audiences interact with historical artifacts when it opened in 2021 by making its vast collection accessible to the public rather than keeping it dormant in storage. El-Sayegh integrates Boijmans’ collection into “Figure, Field, Grid,” for instance, by reinterpreting drawings by 16th-century Mannerists Andrea Lilio and Jacopo da Pontormo. Lilio’s Study of a Male Nude for a Pietà (c. 1596) is repeated throughout the exhibition, a grid housing the sketched male body. Andy Warhol’s photograph The Kiss (Bela Lugosi) from 1963 is also dotted in various forms throughout the room. Warhol and El-Sayegh share a love of repetition, manipulation and silkscreens; in many ways, he’s an appropriate companion to El-Sayegh’s way of making art. El-Sayegh plays with the history of images and our relationship to visual media, but it’s where she extends this theme beyond the history of the Boijmans collection and into contemporary politics that the show becomes most powerful.

The same newspaper front cover appears repeatedly in “Figure, Field, Grid” in various sizes and under different layers of paint and latex. The October 9, 2023, front cover of the Financial Times, two days after the Hamas attack, announced that Israel was at war. The largest of these front pages is displayed side by side with the back page of that FT issue, a Tiffany campaign fronted by Anya Taylor-Joy. The beautiful and the horrific are in dialogue. (Next to this FT spread is another provocative pairing: Andy Warhol prints next to images from Abu Ghraib.) The juxtaposition is disturbing, but its effect is greater than simply a contrast between military action and a diamond ad. Rather, as elsewhere in the exhibition, the visual pairing interrogates how images are served to us, namely as something structured, as something produced by someone else. For the last two years, we in the West have been exposed to images of violence, but access to imagery has largely been filtered by those in power. It is this very fragmentation and filtration of imagery that sustains power dynamics. However, there is another layer to this front-page/back-page diptych. Over it, El-Sayegh has pasted hell money, a Chinese joss paper traditionally burnt as an offering to help family members in the afterlife. By incorporating these gold squares into the piece, El-Sayegh not only continues with the theme of the grid but adds a further level of artistic, historical and personal resonance to her political statement.

El-Sayegh has said that she is trying to categorize experience in her work. The result is a multidisciplinary collage practice that often prioritizes feeling over understanding. It is also a huge undertaking, materially speaking. Amira Gad should be commended for curating such a bold exhibition for the Depot’s inaugural show. If future exhibitions match El-Sayegh’s in experiential discomfort and historical interrogation, that would make Boijmans’ Depot an exhibition space to watch.

“Figure, Field, Grid” is on view at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Depot until March 8, 2026.

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