Starting June 8, some of Brooklyn's most interesting architecture will be found indoors. Over works by Dutch artist M. Escher Company and Federico Giudiceandrea, a longtime Escher collector. Though some might mistake Escher for a psychedelic dreamer type the hippie movement co-opted his more hallucinatory pieces , he was grounded in reality.
Escher's real focus was geometry, toying with the physical landscape, while his background in graphic design sparked an interest in where optical illusions and architecture meet. The show's seven sections conclude with "Eschermania," which shows bits of Escher's work that have seeped, perhaps unknowingly to many consumers, into popular culture.
Most of us have crossed paths with Escher's works on postage stamps, T-shirts, or even an episode of The Simpsons. Mathematicians marvel at the realism of this self-portrait, wherein Escher's eyes lie directly at the center of the metallic orb. Gaddi adds, "Escher said, in a joking way, that the ego is always at the center of the universe.
On first glance, Stars might not look architectural at all. But for Escher, geometry was inherently architectural. It used to be believed, incorrectly, that the plant at the centre of Balcony was cannabis.
He was open-minded and interested in the world and very dedicated to his art. They also became a reference point for cartoonists. At the same time, Escher was capable of concocting potent images with near-universal appeal — something, surely, to which most fine artists would aspire. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
State of the Art Art history. MC Escher: An enigma behind an illusion. Share using Email. Image credit: The M. By Alastair Sooke 24th June The following, from a later Escher essay, could easily serve as a gloss on this image:.
The artist still has the feeling that moving his pencil over the paper is a kind of magic art. It is not he who determines his shapes; it seems rather that the stupid flat shape at which he painstakingly toils has its own will or lack of will , that it is this shape which decides or hinders the movement of the drawing hand, as though the artist were a spiritualist medium.
The situations only became odder. Escher methodically pushed representative techniques to their limits. A later image, Depth , is an entirely fictional investigation into the formal possibilities of perspective: an array of what look like monstrous robotic fish-aeroplanes, receding implicitly into infinite space. Well, naturally. This technique was directly inspired by the Alhambra. Day and Night features black and white bird forms arranged in this way over a chequerboard countryside.
In many of these images the distinction between foreground and background is obliterated: the viewer can choose to see one or other set of shapes as foreground at will.
Most dazzling, perhaps, is the celebrated Ascending and Descending , with its two ranks of human figures trudging forever upwards and eternally downwards respectively on an impossible four-sided eternal staircase. Escher was never a surrealist. But in this picture, it becomes clear that he was a kind of existentialist.
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