The Museum of popular art in Lisbon presents the first exhibition in Portugal dedicated to the fascinating and complex world of Dutch graphic artist, M.C. Escher.
M.C. Escher was an incredibly gifted graphic artist with a distinctive style and a huge imagination. Although he is famous for his geometrical designs and impossible landscapes, he still remains an enigmatic figure.
He never identified himself, or associated, with any artistic movement. Not even with surrealism, which also shared his play with reality and illusion. Escher was a private man, who tended to explore and to work alone, and he always considered himself as a graphic artist rather that an Artist.
The exhibition at the Museum of Popular Art in Lisbon brings together 200 of his original works. It is chronologically organized, spanning from his early works as a student to his final pieces, made in the 1960's.
Escher was born in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands in 1898. He began his studies at the School of Architecture and Design in Haarlem but as soon as his teacher recognized his high skills at printmaking and draughtsmanship he directed him toward a career in the graphic arts. In his early works from the 1920’s, we can already recognize features of his distinctive style. For example, in his woodcut Hand with fir cone (1921), we can notice his attraction for geometrical patterns. The rare woodcut series Pascal’s Flower (1921) captured some of his common themes, such as contrasts and patterns, which also reflect the influence of Asian art. The strange title of the print Whore's Superstition (The Fist) (1921) is one of the most mysterious of Escher's work and refers to the powerful relationship between an artist and his patron.
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Hand with fir cone, (1921)
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| Pascal’s Flower (1921), Whore's Superstition (The Fist) (1921) |
In 1921, Escher moved with his family to Italy, where he developed an interest in Italian landscapes. He used the black and white medium of the woodcut and captured the symmetry and the shape of villages to create a brash yet peaceful view in his woodcut Morano-Calabria (1930).
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| Morano-Calabria (1930). |
Escher visited the Alhambra Palace in Spain, in 1936, which was a turning point for him. The Moorish/Islamic features of the palace's mosaics inspired him to create a new visual language. He became deeply engaged with geometric patterning, divided planes and other optical techniques.
In Metamorphosis (1940), each image is morphed into a tessellated pattern and then slowly alters to another pattern until it becomes a new image. The process starts with the word metamorphose in a black rectangle, followed by several smaller metamorphosed rectangles forming a grid pattern. From abstract shapes, it morphs into reptiles, a honeycomb, insects, fish and birds, that fly and swim toward, or away from, each other. For me, it was a dazzling experience to try to see the development of the images, that gradually change to create an imaginative universe.
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| Metamorphosis (1940). |
By the 1940's, Escher went back to the Netherlands and focused on optical illusions and on paradoxical art. His works hypnotize the viewer with images and graphic details that looks real but are actually impossible. In Relativity (1955), the structure he created has seven stairways, each of which can be used by people who belong to different planes. Two figures use the same stairway in the same direction and on the same side, but each of them uses a different face of each step - one descends the stairway as the other climbs it, even while moving in the same direction nearly side by side. In Belvedere (1958), a plausible-looking belvedere is in fact an impossible object, which is modelled after an impossible cube. Circle Limit II (1960) is one of a series of four woodcuts which are based on a special kind of geometry, Hyperbolic Geometry.
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| Relativity (1955) |
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| Belvedere (1958) |
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| Circle Limit II (1960) |
I went to the exhibition with my family, including my two young children. It was a great opportunity to expose them to the kind of art that relates to other worlds such as mathematics and science. The gallery space has been divided into several subspaces, covered with different patterns. These spaces hosted different collections from the artist, interactive installations and videos of tessellations. These interactive projects and games invited us to explore Escher’s world and to experience some scientific principles which he explored and expressed in his work, such as reflection, perspective, rotation, repetition, negative space, and others.
The Relativity Room, for example, causes disorientation and produces seemingly strange compositions and impossible constructions when viewed from different viewpoints.
Another fun example is The Mirror Room, which, like its name suggests, is entirely composed of mirrors orientated in various directions, and also hanging fish. The reflections create the illusion of an infinite number of rooms, fish, and ourselves.
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The Gallery
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| Watching video |
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| An Interactive Installation |
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| Stepping into this cube will make you a part of the image |
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The Relativity Room
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| The Mirror Room |
The Escher exhibition is a fascinating and fun exhibition of an incredible artist. It allows one to step into his amazingly imaginative world .
At the end of the tour, I was truly wondering why Escher did not define himself as an artist, and if he was more related to the mathematical world, where he was also admired by some great mathematicians. Maybe we can find some answers to that in the essay “The Two Cultures” by C. P. Snow, where the author talks about the great cultural divide between the two great areas of human intellectual activity: Science and Art.
Escher was a practitioner in both areas. He was a gifted draftsman with an endless imagination and outstanding graphic skills. His works are witty and intelligent, possible and impossible, and many of them stand as a bridge over the cultural divide.
Tickets are priced from 9 euros per adult and 3 euros per child aged two, to 12 euros.
The exhibition will run until 27 of May of 2017.
For more information, visit www.escherlisboa.com
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