LESLIE MEZEI
Drawings by computer, Toronto 1967
Leslie Mezei, born in Budapest in 1931
In August 1964 Leslie Mezei published an article called Artistic Design by Computer in the
magazine Computers and Automation. It is often cited as the first article on the subject, and when
he wrote it he had not yet made a drawing of his own. He had trained in physics and mathematics
at McGill and the University of Toronto and spent ten years as a programmer and systems manager
before he joined the computer science faculty at Toronto in 1965, where he founded the
Computer Graphics Group.
In 1967 he began to make the work himself. Most of the drawings shown here come from that year
and start from the same face, a young woman drawn in a few clean lines with her hair falling to one
side. Mezei put her through transformation after transformation. In one sheet her outline breaks
into short dashes, and in another it shivers into zigzags. Girl Stretched pulls her into a long tilted
ellipse, and in Girl Elongated she rises to the top of a tall triangle with her hair streaming out
sideways like a pennant. In the nine images set against black on a single sheet the variations sit next
to one another, and the eye can travel from the plain face at the centre out to its most distant
relatives.
The word BABEL receives the same treatment. Mezei sets it in perspective, wraps it around a
sphere and draws it up into narrow towers, and at the centre of the sheet he lets the letters fall into
a heap.
In 1968 Jasia Reichardt included him in Cybernetic Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary
Arts in London, the first widely attended international exhibition of computer art. His work was
also shown in Montreal in 1967, at the Dům umění in Brno in 1968 and at the Kunstverein
München in 1970. He invited Frieder Nake to Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow, sat on the board
of Experiments in Art and Technology and developed two of the earliest computer graphics
languages, SPARTA and ARTA. His archive is held by the Art Gallery of Ontario. No museum
yet owns one of his drawings.
We are very pleased to welcome Leslie Mezei to the gallery on 22 October 2026 for an evening in
his honour.