M. C. Escher - Couverture souple

Maurits Cornelis Escher was a truly unique artist whose vision was quite unlike anyone else's. To enter his world is to set foot into unknown and unsettling territory. His extraordinary pictures of logic and perspective fool the brain into believing the impossible - that staircases can climb forever, that fish can morph into birds, and that water can run uphill. Escher was a stunning graphic illustrator, especially of landscape and architecture - and in particular of Italian hilltop towns. But it is his world of strange perspectives and distorted vision for which he will be best remembered. The fact that he was able to produce these visual conundrums again and again, delighted and mystified his public, many of whom were mathematicians. Remarkably, Escher had no mathematical training, but through his superb draughtsmanship he explored the furthest reaches of crystallography and defied the laws of reason and perception.

Presenting the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature
M.C. Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden (Netherlands). He received his first drawing lessons during secondary school from F.W. van der Haagen, who also taught him the block printing, thus fostering Escher's innate graphic talents.

From 1912 to 1922 he studied at the School of Architecture and Ornamental Design in Haarlem, where he was instructed in graphic techniques by S. Jessurun de Mesquita.

Escher is not a surrealist drawing us into his dream world, but an architect of perfectly impossible worlds who presents the structurally unthinkable as though it were a law of nature. The resulting dimensional and perspectival illusions bring us into confrontation with the limitations of our sensory perception.