Announcing Solo Exhibition by Mandy El-Sayegh at the Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in the Netherlands by Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985, Malaysia), opening this autumn. El-Sayegh is known for her complex, layered approach to painting, installation, and performance. For this exhibition, she transforms one of the Depot’s galleries into a large-scale, all-encompassing installation that immerses visitors into her world. El-Sayegh creates an environment that lays bare the process behind her work: language, material, and meaning are broken down and rebuilt—layer by layer. This approach aligns closely with the museological principle behind the Depot: making visible what is usually hidden.  

New Exhibition Series: Depot Solo 

This exhibition marks the launch of a new multi-year programme in the Depot, where contemporary artists are invited to develop immersive and site-specific installations. Supported by Ammodo Art, the series offers a platform for experimentation to artists who have not previously had a solo exhibition in the Netherlands. It provides an analogue counterpoint to the growing popularity of digitally immersive environments.

About the exhibition 

For this new commission, El-Sayegh presents an installation that reveals the anatomy of her paintings through newly created works: collages composed of silkscreen prints and hand-painted elements that incorporate both art historical and contemporary references, including reproductions of Old Master drawings from the collection of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. The result is a space that functions both as an exhibition and a laboratory: fragmentary, intimate, and immersive at once. 

El-Sayegh’s multidisciplinary practice spans painting, collage, installation, video, and performance. Her work brings together an array of visual and textual materials: fragments of newsprint and advertisements, anatomy books, scientific diagrams, her father’s Arabic calligraphy, silkscreen layers, hand-painted grids, and sheets of latex. These elements are assembled into compositions that reflect how information is categorised, circulated, and interpreted. Through this methodology, she explores the instability of meaning and the ways in which it can be constructed. 

About the artist 

Mandy El-Sayegh (b. 1985, Malaysia) lives and works in London. She earned her BA in Fine Art from the University of Westminster in 2007, followed by an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2009. Her first institutional solo show, the specially commissioned installation Cite Your Sources, took place at Chisenhale Gallery in London in 2019. Since then, her work has been presented internationally in exhibitions at venues including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Sursock Museum in Beirut. In 2022, two of her works, Net-Grid (my dad knows nothing) (2020) and Figured Ground (2020), were acquired for the permanent collection of Tate Modern. 

Mandy El-Sayegh Solo Exhibition 

Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Gallery I) 

1 November 2025 – 8 March 2026 

Save the date Press Preview: 30 October 2025 

 A performance is scheduled to take place during Museumnacht on 7 March 2026, which will bring the exhibition to life in a new way.