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Journey to Infinity: Escher’s World of Wonder showcases the works of M. C. Escher, one of the world’s most famous graphic artists.
Featuring over 150 original works, the exhibition is a retrospective of his enigmatic sketches and paradoxical designs. The display begins with his early prints and naturalistic drawings inspired by Italy’s landscape. The exhibition further explores M.C. Escher’s work on tessellation and transformation of shapes, illustrating how metamorphosis became a unique feature of his art, blending fantasy and geometry. Pursuing his mathematical research, he created boundless images executed with incredible detail and precision in an attempt to represent infinity.
Until today, the international scientific community praises M.C. Escher’s work as a symbol of the interrelationship of Art and Science. Despite his understanding of mathematics being mainly visual and intuitive, he played with architecture and perspective to invent infinite and immersive worlds of wonder. M.C. Escher’s artwork continues to and inspire generations of artists, architects, mathematicians, musicians and designers, fond of his playful fantasies and fascinating constructions.
Self-portrait
1929
Lithograph
The Liberty Collection, USA
M.C. Escher's early works were inspired by Art Nouveau, a popular art style originated in the late 19th century in Europe. He also had a reverence for nature and created numerous prints representing realistic drawings of insects and flowers.
His journeys in Italy between 1921 and 1935 inspired him to extensively depict its countryside.
The characteristics of M.C. Escher’s work come from his meticulous observation of nature and his passion for the geometrical regularity he noticed in the world surrounding him.
Regular Division of the Plane II
1957
Woodcut
The Liberty Collection, USA
The crucial turning point in M. C. Escher's artistic development was his second trip to southern Spain in 1936. There, he visited famous Moorish architectural landmarks such as the Alhambra Palace in Granada and the Mezquita in Cordoba. These visits inspired him to methodically study the patterns the artisans of the 14th century used to decorate the walls and the arches of the Moorish monuments.
He then became passionate about tessellations: geometric decoration, where triangles, stars or squares repeat like tiles to cover a plane without leaving any gaps. He meticulously produced over 100 watercolours showing different motifs of tessellation in an exercise book. These motifs represented 17 different ways of filling a flat surface with regular patterns and his study of various colouring possibilities.
Sky and Water I
1938
Woodcut
The Liberty Collection, USA
M.C. Escher created a world in which whirls of transformations are based on different kinds of tessellations and where abstract shapes change into concrete forms. A world where birds can gradually transform into fishes or a lizard morph into the cell of a honey comb. At times, transformations lead to opposite combinations such as day and night, or good and evil.
Escher did not limit his research to the regular division of the plane; he was also fascinated by reflective surfaces as depicted in his famous self-portrait Hand with Reflecting Sphere.
Verblifa Tin
1963
Private Collection, Italy
Print Gallery
1956
Lithograph
The Liberty Collection, USA
M.C. Escher’s understanding of mathematics was largely visual and intuitive. His compositions explored errors in perspective, through structures that, at first sight, seemed perfectly plausible, but upon closer inspection turned out to be impossible to create.
In 1954, he started interacting with scientists. This resulted in a vast source of inspiration for his research, mainly on impossible constructions, optical illusions and representation of the infinity.
Some of his most famous works: Ascending and Descending, Print Gallery and Relativity highlight M.C. Escher’s attempts to represent the limitless. These masterpieces reflect an essential aspect of his art: its intricate relation to mathematics and endless compositions.
Pink Floyd
Ummagumma
1969
Private Collection, Italy
Until today, references to the works of M.C Escher can be found in various domains, ranging from artistic fields to popular culture.
Numerous contemporary painters and digital artists have been inspired by M.C. Escher’s work on tessellation and have interpreted it in their own artistic language. Musicians and singers from the late 1960’s were also fond of M.C.Escher’s creative process. In the domain of comics and cartoons, his geometric world inspired the creators of famous comic characters.
They showcase how the Escher Mania has affected all creative domains and how M.C. Escher’s work is still influencing contemporary culture.
All M.C. Escher works © 2016 The M.C. Escher Company – the Netherlands. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com
Tessellation Puzzle Activity
Visitors are invited to explore the potentials of tessellation with a large-scale Escher-inspired puzzle, through which they will discover the four principles of tessellation.
The Relativity Room
M.C. Escher was fascinated with the peculiar problems of depicting perspective. He created seemingly strange and impossible environments through his body of works. Visitors can step into Escher's Relativity Room, which plays with the room's proportions to create a distorted illusion of size.
Public Guided Tour
In English:
Family Fridays 6 & 20 Jan, 3 & 24 Feb | 3pm - 4pm
Sunday 8, 15 & 22 Jan, 5, 12, 19 & 26 Feb | 5pm - 6pm
Sunday 26 Feb | 11:30am - 12:30pm
In Mandarin:
Saturday 14 & 21 Jan, 4 Feb | 2pm - 3pm & 4pm - 5pm
Send your brain spinning in this guided tour that brings you into the fantastical and impossible realm of M.C. Escher’s imagination. Discover how mathematical ideas and art are intertwined in Escher’s works, and how his way of thinking continues to have a profound influence today.
Complimentary to ticket-holders of Journey to Infinity: Escher's World of Wonder. Up to 25 participants on a first-come, first-served basis.
Make Your Own Tessellation Prints Workshop
Family Fridays 6 & 20 Jan, 3 & 24 Feb | 4:30pm - 5:30pm
Discover the poetry of mathematics in this hands-on art-making workshop. With a starting point in grids and shapes, participants experiment and design their own tessellation prints, drawing inspiration from M.C. Escher’s tessellation artworks and emblematas.
$3 per participant, available to ticket-holders of Journey to Infinity: Escher's World of Wonder. Up to 20 participants on a first-come, first-served basis.
Dr. Federico Giudiceandrea, the curator of Journey to Infinity: Escher’s World of Wonder exhibition at ArtScience Museum, Marina Bay Sands, is an avid collector of Dutch artist M.C. Esher’s works. His fascination with Escher began in high school, amassing over 150 prints and artworks by the Dutch graphic artist since 1990. In 2007, Dr. Giudiceandrea professionalised his personal interest by curating an Escher-themed exhibition, and today, he is behind more than 10 Escher exhibitions. He is also a board member of MUSEION (South Tyrolean Modern Art Museum).
Dr. Giudiceandrea is currently the Co-Founder, President, CEO and Director of the Research and Development Department at Microtec – a global wood scannig company. He has received many awards in recognition of his engineering works with Microtec – including the iF Design Award (2015) and the Marcus Wallenberg Prize (Winner, 2016).
The M.C. Escher Foundation was established by M.C. Escher himself in 1968 and its goal was to preserve the legacy of his work. The M.C. Escher Foundation today organizes exhibitions, publishes books and films about the life and work of M.C. Escher. The Foundation has a large collection of original work by M.C. Escher to its deposal and tries to get as many original pieces back to the Netherlands.
Arthemisia Group is Italy’s leading company in the production, organisation and staging of art exhibitions. Arthemisia Group has introduced and consolidated a new way of creating exhibitions, and is now a national and international point of reference for the organisation and production of high quality art events. Since 2000 Arthemisia has produced more than 450 exhibitions.
