Dom Sylvester Houédard at Lisson Gallery

Lisson Gallery presents the first New York show of concrete poet, visual artist, writer and Benedictine monk, Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924–1992) and its first solo exhibition of his work for almost 50 years. In dense visual complexity or in geometrically precise arrangements of words and symbols, Houédard’s typewritten sheets and typographic constructions defied both linguistic constraints and mechanical conventions of the typewriter. These visual poems and their oration, added to his notoriety in 1960s London, where he would often stage readings or performances of his haikus and phonetic compositions. Working into the night in his monastery cloisters, he created a stream of visual poems on his portable Olivetti typewriter, combining conscious and unconscious word association with heavily condensed characters and overlapping key strokes.