Cross-sensory perception quickens and multiplies in Smell of First Snow, Shirazeh Houshiary’s eighth exhibition at Lisson Gallery. Through painting, drawing and sculpture, Houshiary approaches the intangible and evanescent, articulating a metaphysical reality that lies beyond mere form and surface. A diaphanous mesh of pencilled words traces its way across Houshiary’s canvases like spiralling strands of DNA. Each word is precisely written yet cumulatively becomes illegible, individual meanings giving way to vibrations that invoke a plethora of nonverbal associations. Migratory currents, the minute structures of living matter, shifting atmospheres and the whorls of fingerprints are simultaneously summoned in the written topographies that swirl and crystallise across the picture surface, conveying turbulent energies and the processes of the universe. In the vast central diptych, A Deluge (2015), a tissue formed of i

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