2015: The Amazing World of M.C.Escher

"Escher makes a visual statement on eternity that will send your brain spinning" - The Guardian

"Makes you wonder why this is the first major show in the UK to focus on him" - The Times

“The exhibition offers a rare opportunity to reappraise a pioneering figure of 20th century art and a master of illusion and paradox” - The Independent

"M.C. Escher achieves the impossible and so much more" - Londonist

The imaginative world of Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898–1972) is a playful and impossible place, his work executed with mathematic precision.

The first major UK show of work by the great Dutch master draughtsman, The Amazing World of M.C. Escher brought together works which made him one of the most famous artists of the 20th Century. The exhibition included woodcuts, lithographs, drawings, watercolours and mezzotints, as well as exclusive archive material.

In 1918, Escher set out on a career as an architect, studying at the School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem, Holland. It was here that a teacher spotted his talent as a draughtsman and printmaker, and he was advised to move into the Graphic Arts department. His career as a printmaker dates from this moment, and in his early prints it is clear that he already had an interest in the peculiarities of perspective and unusual vantage points.

Escher worked during the turn of the century, through two world wars, and alongside significant scientific and mathematic advancements. He continued his career in to the 1960s, when demand for copies of his prints reached fever pitch. These decades of development and revolution, as well as uncertainty, can be seen in Escher’s exploration of pattern, space and his surrealist viewpoints.

The exhibition was organised by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and showcased nearly 100 works from the collection of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands.

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