MC Escher

Escher - prints and drawings

From impossible ladders to tessellated birds, Dutch artist M. C. Escher (1898–1972) created a unique graphic language of patterns, puzzles, and mathematics. Dense, complex, and built on intricate principles, his work is at once decorative and playful, always balancing optical illusions and the limits of sensory perception. To mathematicians and scientists, Escher is an absolute genius. To hippies, he was the pioneer of psychedelic art.

Born in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, in 1898, Escher initially focused on nature and landscapes, exhibiting regularly in the Netherlands and even achieving a certain international recognition. However, it was during a trip to the Alhambra in Spain in the 1920s that Escher found his true calling. Studying the palace's Moorish architectural motifs, he became fascinated by the coexistence and interdependence of interlocking forms.

Working primarily with lithographs and woodcuts, Escher began to explore with almost obsessive enthusiasm the relationships between forms, shapes, and space. He delighted in unusual viewpoints, multiple perspectives, the transition from two-dimensionality to illusory three-dimensionality, and complex mathematical puzzles, such as the Möbius strip: a seemingly infinite loop that twists upon itself in a contortion that defies the laws of physics.

This introductory volume in the TASCHEN Basic Art 2.0 series delves into Escher's brilliant mind through his seminal works, the fruit of a relentless investigation of image and perception. Within its pages, you'll find fish transforming into birds, lizards leaping from the page, masterful reflections, endless labyrinths, and some of the most surprising and disconcerting images of 20th-century art.