According to a quote adorning the wall at the start of Somerset House’s new exhibition – a retrospective dedicated to perception-altering Dutch artist MC Escher, running until September 6 – his work is “a game, a very serious game”. It’s a mixture of earnestness and play that could also be said for the show itself.
Curated by leading expert and MC Escher Foundation president Federico Giudiceandrea, a walk through MC Escher. The Exhibition is both intellectually stimulating and all sorts of fun. Some areas are dedicated to the theory behind the intricate tessellations and playful paradoxes that have turned his drawings of impossible staircases and infinite worlds into globally recognised images. Others are interactive, encouraging visitors to take photos and immerse themselves in living versions of Escher’s groundbreakingly weird ideas.
The hope, Giudiceandrea tells Broadsheet, is that people can engage with the work on multiple levels – much like Escher posited himself. “It’s [a mirror to] our reality – you might think that everything’s fine and in the right place, but what’s behind is much more complex,” he says of the artist’s core belief. “Escher tells us that we can look at things in a superficial way and everything looks nice, but if you look deeper then you’ll see something completely different.”
Giudiceandrea began his obsession with Escher as a student, when he found Escher’s art in mathematics books, but also saw him on the covers of his favourite pop records. “The idea that an artist was beloved by artists and hippies but also mathematicians intrigued me,” he explains. This mix of technicality and creativity is in abundance throughout the exhibition. Part of it is presented chronologically, starting in the ’20s with his more traditional Italian landscapes, then moving into more surreal territory. As his explorations into mathematics deepened, Escher developed the mathematical language to create two of his most famous prints: Ascending and Descending (1960) and Waterfall (1961), with their impossible staircases and tessellations that seem to shift before your eyes.
It could all feel overly academic. How do you make an exhibition partly about maths fun? But Giudiceandrea and Somerset House have managed it. With soothing classical music playing, you’re invited to enter strange mirror worlds, filled with Escher’s favourite spheres. In one room, you can take part in a classic perception experiment, in which one person appears much taller than the other due to the room’s dimensions, while another is dedicated to Escher’s substantial impact on pop culture, with a screening rolling through clips from The Simpsons to Squid Game.
And fundamentally, the art itself is still some of the most mind-boggling out there. Nearly a century on from its creation, it’s still – by its very nature – unfeasible to get your brain around the Dutch innovator’s impossible scenes.
In a world of scrolling, Giudiceandrea hopes that an afternoon spent with MC Escher might encourage people to really engage with the world around them. “I hope people go away understanding that perhaps, in the future, they should look at things beyond the surface,” he says. “Always try to go a little deeper.”
MC Escher. The Exhibition runs until September 6 at Somerset House.
