Exploring Escher’s Exhibition
You know the images, even if you can’t place the name: staircases that ascend forever and arrive back at their starting point, hands that reach out of the page to draw each other into existence, fish that imperceptibly become birds, black that dissolves into white, and sky that transfigures into water. These pictures live in the background of the cultural subconscious – on maths classroom posters, album covers, and the back walls of university corridors – so embedded in our visual vocabulary that they can feel more like natural phenomena than anything man-made.
Over 150 of M.C Escher’s original works have arrived in London for the first time, and they reveal not just a master of impossible worlds, but a deeply human story about failure, exile, obsession, and wonder. Maurits Cornelis Escher was one of the great visual thinkers of the 20th century, an artist who understood that perception is not passive reception but active construction – his images do not merely trick the eye, they expose the operating system.
Hosted at Somerset House, the show includes major works such as Day and Night, Relativity, Hand with Reflecting Sphere, Waterfall, Ascending and Descending, Drawing Hands and Metamorphosis II, alongside interactive installations designed to let visitors step, quite literally, into Escher’s perceptual machinery.
Logic, Love, And Language
Escher was born in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, on 17 June 1898 – which means the London exhibition opened just days before what would have been his 128th birthday. His father, George Arnold Escher, was a civil engineer; his family, respectable and educated. The young Maurits Escher, however, was a quiet disaster at school. He failed his exams, had to repeat multiple grades, and never obtained his diploma. He was sickly as a child and appears to have remained shy, private, and socially uneasy throughout much of his life.
He enrolled at the Technical College in Delft to study architecture, which was his father’s pragmatic suggestion, but switched almost immediately to graphic design at the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, having been drawn in by a lecture from Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita – a Dutch graphic artist who would become the formative influence of his early career. Under de Mesquita, Escher fell into printmaking with the dedication of someone who has finally found their native language.
His early works showed the influence of Art Nouveau and Symbolism, but even in those youthful images, the obsessions that would define him were already stirring: careful attention to natural forms, geometric patterning, the first faint hints of tessellation. The seeds of everything were there, waiting for the right soil; That soil would turn out to be Italy.
In 1922, Escher packed his bags and headed south. Consumed by the Italian landscapes, he travelled widely while sketching and photographing the architecture of Amalfi, the volcanic shores of Calabria, and the labyrinthine streets of old cities that seemed to have grown rather than been built. He rendered these places into lithographs and woodcuts of extraordinary beauty, technically accomplished and luminously observed.
In the Italian town of Ravello in 1923, he met the Swiss family Umiker, and fell in love with the youngest daughter, Giulietta. A flurry of letters crossed the Alps over the following months. They married in 1924 and settled in Rome, where they would remain for eleven years and have three children. These were by all accounts, good years: productive, warm, and grounded.
Escher exhibited regularly, collaborated with other artists, and received his first real recognition. The lithograph Nonza, Corsica, depicting a Corsican village, won third prize at the International Exhibition of Contemporary Prints in Chicago in 1934. However he was not, even then, an artist of great commercial success, and he struggled to support his family. While Italy shaped him, his real transformation would begin in Spain, after one afternoon in the gardens of a medieval palace in Granada.
The Inner Landscape
In 1936, on a journey through the Mediterranean made in exchange for some of his paintings to an Adria shipping company, Escher visited the Alhambra. The fortified Nasrid palace complex, built by the Moorish emirs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, is covered in tiles that are elaborate geometric decorations filling every surface with interlocking patterns. In the Alhambra’s architectural decoration, geometry, calligraphy and vegetal ornament replaced the figurative traditions more familiar in much European art.
Escher was transfixed. He spent days sketching the mosaics, studying the symmetries, trying to understand how the patterns worked. He knew nothing, at this point, of crystallography or group theory or the mathematics of plane symmetry. He was simply a printmaker who couldn’t take his eyes off a wall. But something clicked into place that would occupy the rest of his life.
Escher became obsessed with tessellations – the challenge of tiling a plane with interlocking shapes, and specifically with shapes that were not abstract geometric forms but living things: fish, birds, lizards, horsemen, angels. He compiled a catalogue of 137 watercolours, numbered and archived with almost scientific rigour, each a different motif for tessellations and metamorphoses. The discipline was ferocious.
Meanwhile, history was bearing down, and Mussolini’s Italy became untenable. In 1935, the family left Rome for Switzerland, which was an experience that Escher hated; the northern light gave him nothing and the landscape offered no inspiration. He was deeply depressed at losing Italy, and turned, as he would put it, to “inner images” – to the world he could construct from mathematics and imagination rather than from observation of the world outside.
This movement from world to mind is the core of Escher’s retrospective. It is also where the Somerset House show becomes more than a parade of famous images. Escher’s art sits at the charged intersection between Renaissance perspective, Islamic geometry, printmaking, crystallography, visual psychology and existential comedy. He was not a surrealist, although the label clings to him like glitter. Surrealism often stages the eruption of dream into reality. Escher’s oddness is more exacting. His impossible worlds do not feel like fantasies, they feel like proofs that something has gone wrong with proof itself.
The mathematical dimension of Escher’s work is often overstated in one sense and understated in another. He was not producing equations disguised as pictures, and he was not a mathematician in the formal academic sense. Yet he was intensely engaged with mathematical structure: symmetry, tessellation, infinity, reflection, recursion, perspective, hyperbolic geometry and impossible objects. His brother Berend, a geologist, helped connect him with crystallographic work on symmetry groups. Later, Escher’s world overlapped with mathematicians including Donald Coxeter and Roger Penrose. The relationship was reciprocal rather than decorative: mathematicians did not simply explain Escher after the fact; his images helped stimulate new visual and conceptual problems.
In 1954, Coxeter sent Escher a paper on symmetry containing a figure that showed how to construct a pattern in hyperbolic space – a non-Euclidean geometry in which the usual rules of parallel lines and flat planes do not apply. Escher, who recognised none of the mathematical language, saw something in the image that he had been searching for: a way to represent infinity within a finite frame. He had been struggling to depict an endless pattern contained within a bounded circle, shapes diminishing toward the edge in a mathematically consistent way.
Armed with nothing but drawing instruments, he produced the Circle Limit series including four woodcuts of staggering precision that represent the hyperbolic plane using the Poincaré disk model. When Coxeter examined them, he was astonished. Escher had got the geometry “absolutely right, to the millimetre.” The mathematician then spent months working out the trigonometry to prove what Escher had accomplished using visual intuition. Escher admitted that he barely grasped what his correspondents were telling him about his own work, once confiding to his son that although mathematicians regularly sought him out to discuss their enthusiasm for his prints, he understood nothing they said.
This gap between formal logic and intuitive reasoning is one of the most illuminating things about him. When he exchanged ideas with Roger Penrose, his “impossible triangle” directly inspired Escher’s Waterfall, depicting a mill wheel perpetually powered by water that appears to flow uphill. The artist made visible what the mathematician could only describe in symbols, and the mathematician provided the frameworks the artist immediately sensed but could not have named.
Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach helped frame Escher through the idea of the “strange loop”: a system that moves through levels only to return, unexpectedly, to where it began. Drawing Hands is the cleanest visual version of this problem. Two hands draw each other into being. Creator and creation become mutually dependent. Cause becomes effect. The picture is funny, but it is also a diagram of selfhood with the lights flickering.
That is why Escher feels newly relevant. Contemporary life is full of strange loops: algorithms shape the desires that shape the algorithms; Institutions produce categories that produce the behaviours that seem to justify the categories; People curate selves that then begin curating them back. Escher’s work offers a visual grammar for this feedback age, illustrating recursive systems before recursion became a lifestyle disease.
While Escher is often remembered through a handful of iconic works, his trajectory shows a mind gradually refining its obsessions. The early landscapes reveal observational discipline; Tessellations reveal a hunger for order; Metamorphoses are an interest in transformation; And the impossible constructions reveal something deeper: the mind’s ability to accept local coherence even when the whole structure is impossible. That, psychologically, is where Escher becomes unnerving – the contradiction emerges only when the viewer tries to hold the whole system in mind.
Situated Scenes
The exhibition also gives glimpses of the personal and historical Escher, which matters because his work can otherwise seem bloodless, more machine than man. During the Second World War, he moved back to the Netherlands where he refused to register with the Nazi-imposed cultural chamber. His former teacher, the Jewish printmaker Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, was taken by German forces and killed; after which Escher helped to preserve his teacher’s work.
In 1945, Escher designed a diploma for students graduating from a temporary academy in Eindhoven, recently liberated from Nazi occupation. Behind an owl in the foreground, columns of black smoke rise from a riverside town, their sinuousness reflected in the water. This complicates the idea of Escher as an artist sealed away in pure geometry. The world entered the pattern with its horrors, losses and moral pressures – these things were not absent from his imagination, they were transmuted by it.
Still, Escher’s dominant mode is not confession. Unlike artists whose work arrives soaked in autobiography, Escher often hides himself inside systems. Hand with Reflecting Sphere is one of the exceptions, a self-portrait in which the artist appears reflected in a polished globe held in his own hand. The image compresses room, body and world into a curved miniature. It is both humble and cosmic: a man in a domestic interior holding a small planet of perception. The viewer sees Escher seeing himself, and the loop tightens.
In the 1960s, the hippie counterculture adopted Escher wholesale, partly against his will. His infinite, looping, impossible images resonated powerfully with a generation exploring altered-states of consciousness. His prints appeared on posters, T-shirts, and album covers, while the rock band Mott the Hoople used his work on their debut album in 1969. His work was co-opted as a symbol of alternative ways of seeing the world.
Escher was bemused and somewhat uncomfortable with this. He was not a counterculture figure in any meaningful biographical sense – he was a quiet, meticulous, private man who lived in the Dutch village of Baarn with his family, worked at his woodblocks with extraordinary patience and care, and was mildly confused by the adulation. He had spent most of his career struggling to sell enough prints to feed his children. Now he was a psychedelic icon. But he accepted it with the pragmatism of a man who had long been used to the world not quite knowing what to do with him.
In 1964 Escher wrote “My work is a game, a very serious game.” This gives his art a peculiar ethical charge. Escher shows that freedom is not always the absence of structure; sometimes it is what structure makes possible. Tessellation, after all, is a game of limits. A shape must fit, edges must meet, and transformation must obey some rule, even if the result feels miraculous. The same is true of his impossible architecture.
The illusion works because local rules are honoured with fanatical precision, but the impossible requires discipline. And in 2026, his themes around what the eye reports and what reason can make sense of, feel not just relevant but urgent in an age of deepfakes, AI-generated imagery, and virtual environments. We are swimming in images designed to appear real, while being constructed impossibilities.
The retrospective also raises a broader question about how art history assigns value. Escher was long treated as peripheral by the mainstream art establishment, too popular, too illustrative, too mathematical, too uncool in the approved avant-garde sense. Yet he reached audiences across disciplines with unusual force. Scientists, designers, architects, musicians, filmmakers, programmers and children all found something in his work – exploring images that can be entered through wonder and exited through philosophy.
