Escher was a printmaker par excellence. He made his first print when he was seventeen and his last when he was seventy-one, mastering a number of complex techniques including woodcut, lithography and mezzotint.

Prints are works produced in multiples by transferring an image from a printing surface, called a matrix, onto paper. Usually the matrix is a block of wood, a metal plate or a lithographic stone. The image drawn onto the matrix is reversed in the process of printing.

Escher’s preferred printing techniques were woodcut and wood engraving, of which he made over 300, all printed by hand using either the back of a small ivory spoon or a rolling pin for larger works – the Dutch inscription eigen druk (‘own printing’) appears in pencil below many of these works. He also made more than seventy lithographs. Escher’s lithographs were made in limited editions that, because of the complexity of the process, were printed by a specialist lithographer.

Escher was attracted to printmaking for three reasons: the desire for multiplication, the beauty of the craft and the imposed limitations of each printing technique – that is, he enjoyed the strict discipline involved in printmaking, which he viewed as order in the face of chaos.

Learn more about Escher’s printmaking techniques

After graduating in April 1922, Escher travelled to Italy with friends, beginning an enduring fascination with the country that would profoundly influence his career. He returned to Italy later that year and made it his home, and the subject of his art, until he left in 1935.

In 1923 Escher fell in love with Jetta Umiker, the daughter of a Swiss industrialist. They married the following year and established their home in Rome. From the mid 1920s Escher developed an annual routine of touring remote areas in the spring to seek ‘refreshment for his body and spirit’ as well as inspiration for his work. His photographs and sketches of Corsica, Calabria, Sicily, the Amalfi Coast and the Abruzzi region provided source material for landscape prints that he would make in winter.

Escher was as captivated by expansive landscapes as he was by the ‘little pieces of nature’ such as plants, trees and insects. He strove to analyse and understand the wondrous diversity of the natural world and to convey its essential qualities. Escher was intent on perfecting his graphic skills during his time in Italy, and his nature and landscape prints display extraordinary technical virtuosity. Escher’s later description of these works as mere ‘finger exercises’ has obscured their significance and the role that close observation of reality played in his art.

Escher was intrigued by reflections, which were a recurring theme in his work. His first images on the subject were self-portraits that he made using a reflective sphere in the early 1920s. Escher continued to explore this motif over the next three decades using mirrors, flat surfaces of water, dew drops and even the human eye as pictorial devices through which he could unite different worlds in one composition.

In the months before he left Italy in 1935, Escher produced a sequence of major lithographs in which he explored trompe l’oeil effects using mirrored surfaces. His mastery of illusion and love of visual paradox is revealed in meticulously rendered spheres that present distorted reflections, and dressing-table mirrors that impossibly link interior and external views. The deceptions in these images are not immediately apparent but only reveal themselves upon close inspection.

In three prints from the 1950s, Escher used reflections on the surfaces of ponds and puddles to link different spatial realms. Looking down onto the flat surface of the water reveals reflections of the sky above, uniting two and even three dimensions. Reflective surfaces provided Escher with an important motif through which he could unite worlds, play with spatial realities and link the possible and the impossible.

Escher was obsessed with patterns made from repeated interlocking shapes, known as tessellations. He described them as the richest source of inspiration he had ever encountered and developed his own layman’s theory on the subject, which he called ‘the regular division of the plane’. This fascination would completely transform Escher’s art.

Although his earliest tessellation dates from the 1920s, Escher’s serious interest in the subject was inspired by his second visit to the Alhambra in Spain, in 1936. The abstract patterns of the Moorish tiles and wall decorations inspired him to study the geometric laws underpinning tessellations. He initially worked intuitively, then later with the aid of academic articles on crystallography. These introduced him to the systems through which regular shapes could be repeated on the flat plane to infinity. Over the next three decades Escher created more than 130 tessellation drawings of extraordinary variety and inventiveness using colourful, figurative motifs.

Escher’s prints from 1937 mark a departure in his oeuvre that developed from his study of the regular division of the plane and drew upon motifs from the drawings. The regular division of the plane provided the tools for Escher to achieve a seamless metamorphosis of form in his images; it also offered new ways of translating two-dimensional form into three. Through these formal devices Escher gave expression to his imaginary world of ‘inner visions’.

‘I cannot help mocking all our unwavering certainties. It is, for example, great fun to deliberately confuse two and three dimensions, the plane and space, or to poke fun at gravity. Are you sure that a floor cannot also be a ceiling? Are you absolutely certain that you go up when you walk up a staircase?’
M. C. ESCHER

Many of Escher’s most iconic works play with spatial ambiguities and optical illusions and combine two and three dimensions. He delighted in playing with a viewer’s perception and exploring the hidden complexities in pictorial representation. In several early architectural prints, Escher used unusual vantage points or perspectival distortions to manipulate the representation of space. He explored these themes further in later prints that combined multiple viewpoints to create impossible structures that could be drawn on paper but could never exist in reality. The visual conundrums Escher created in these works both intrigue the eye and puzzle the mind. They also highlight the deceptive nature of figurative art in its representation of the three-dimensional world on the two-dimensional picture plane.

Escher was captivated by the challenge of representing infinity. His tessellation drawings had implied endless repetition on a flat plane; similarly, the never-ending cycle which featured in many of his prints and his later use of visual devices such as the Mobius strip both suggested infinity. He took the concept even further in the mid 1950s, when he began using regularly diminishing tessellations in circular compositions.

In 1954 an exhibition of Escher’s prints coincided with the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam and was viewed by hundreds of delegates. It ignited interest in his work from the global mathematics community, among them young British mathematician Roger Penrose and Canadian geometer H. S. M. Coxeter. Escher began a correspondence with both men, who provided him with ideas for new work and solutions to problems he had been unable to resolve.

In the late 1950s Escher created his most iconic images of seemingly impossible buildings, some of which incorporated impossible objects introduced to him by mathematicians. Escher wanted these prints to at first mystify viewers by presenting something unfathomable, but then describe the perfectly legitimate method by which it was constructed, thereby making the impossible possible. Escher incorporated elements from his early observations of nature into these prints, which helped to situate them within the familiar, ‘real’ world.

Nendo has created an immersive exhibition experience from specially created architectural, spatial and design elements. For the exhibition, nendo has devised the minimalist form of a house as the fundamental module of the design. This iconic form is a readily understood symbol of space that appears throughout the exhibition in different forms, enabling visitors to experience Escher’s ideas in a physical way.

When approaching this collaboration, nendo made a conscious choice to adopt Escher’s logic-based processes and seek inspiration from his world to create new work for the exhibition. The animation projected on the floor of the entrance corridor symbolises these ‘seeds’ of ideas that later evolve into art and spatial installations. With resonances of how an idea evolves, clouds of small particles gradually form lines and connect to become surfaces that create the house motif that will accompany visitors on their journey through the exhibition.

This gallery presents Escher’s early landscape prints which, while less well-known, were the foundation for his later and more famous works. A ‘house bench’ in the centre of the gallery is designed to symbolise Escher’s beginnings and his process of finding his voice as an artist. The house forms gradually emerge from the bench on one side while they become visible as negative shapes receding away from the base on the other. Positioned directly in front of Escher’s landscape prints, the house bench itself appears as a scenery view, yet also allows visitors to sit and delve into the intricate details of the works.

Escher’s fascination with reflections has inspired the layout of this gallery and the house elements within it. The space is designed symmetrically as if one side is the mirror image of the other, an effect accentuated by the mirroring of the house-patterned flooring in the central case.

The house installation in this gallery comprises narrow strips of laser-cut mirrored surfaces mounted on the side walls. When lit from a specific angle, light is reflected back onto the wall above each strip while simultaneously casting a shadow below. The light and shadow meet in between the two mirrored surfaces to complete one house. Just as Escher found a new dimension in the replication of the world on reflective surfaces, so too is a new dimension found in the meeting point between light and shadow.

This split-level gallery explores Escher’s lifelong research into the ‘regular division of the plane’ and presents two distinct viewing experiences. The upper gallery provides both a display space for Escher’s works and a viewing platform from which the lower level can be contemplated. On the lower level, a house installation appears as a three-dimensional tessellation in which a row of four black houses gradually transforms into a row of five white houses. The roofs of the houses gradually open up and out, as if turned inside out, until the spaces exterior to the houses at the front of the gallery have become interior spaces at the back. While descending the ramp to the lower level, the viewers’ vantage point slowly changes until they are able to walk around and into the houses, as if stepping into a two-dimensional picture. Some of Escher’s works are presented in single display cases both within and alongside the houses, and visitors can take their own route through the gallery, discovering the works as they immerse themselves in the installation.

An immersive installation of black metal rods within an all-white gallery has been designed for this presentation of Escher’s works exploring extreme perspectives and optical illusions. The rods enable the works to be displayed in a new spatial arrangement rather than simply being mounted on the walls, and are arranged in a rhombus-shaped layout around a centrally placed mirror structure. At first glance the metal rods appear to be placed in a clutter, but when viewed from a specific angle a house shape appears.

In response to Escher’s fascination with the representation of infinity, this gallery was designed as a circular space for the display of the artist’s endlessly transforming tessellations and impossible geometric loops. In the centre of the room, a five metre–wide ‘chandelier’ constructed from more than 50,000 die-cut black and white houses is suspended from the ceiling. The inversion of colour in the middle of the installation forms a three-dimensional house shape that floats in the centre and changes its appearance according to the visitor’s vantage point. When viewed from the opposite angle this same image is in the opposite colour, requiring the viewer to complete a circuit around the gallery to fully experience the installation.