ASTI.- From 16 November 2024 to 11 May 2025, the exhibition rooms in Palazzo Mazzetti in Asti will display the works of Escher, the artistic genius and visionary, and a favourite with the general public around the planet. Iconic among art lovers but also among mathematicians, designers, and graphic artists, his unique creations combine art with the universe of numbers, science with nature, and reality with imagination, generating fanciful inventions and paradoxes both magical and marked by strong scientific rigour
Born in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands in 1898, Maurits Cornelis Escher developed his own unique and unmistakable style thanks to his extraordinary ability to transport visitors into imaginary and seemingly impossible worlds.
In his creations, the great Dutch master, who lived and travelled in Italy between the two World Wars, brings together countless themes and suggestions: from geometric theorems to mathematical insights, from philosophical reflections to logical paradoxes. His unmistakable works, which also influenced the world of design and advertising, raise a challenge to perception and are unique on the landscape of art history for all time.
In Asti, through the display of more than 100 works accompanied by educational analysis, videos, and immersive rooms, the exhibition presents Escher’s entire artistic path, from his beginnings to his travels in Italy, as well as the various techniques that engaged him throughout his life and made him a unique artist.
Amid tessellations, metamorphoses, structures of space, and geometrical paradoxes, and including the works that, beginning in the 1950s, raised his popularity so much that we can speak of a full-blown “Eschermania” today, the exhibition displays the Dutch artist’s most well-known works, like Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935), Bond of Union (1956), Metamorphosis II (1939), Day and Night (1938), his famed Emblemata series, and so many more.
‟I feel truly fortunate to begin my term in office at the leadership of Asti’s museums,” said Francesco Antonio Lepore, the new President of Fondazione Asti Musei, “with the exhibition of an artist who, through his genius, and relying exclusively on his graphic mastery and mathematical skills, was able to explore those impossible universes that now appear closer to us thanks to algorithms and artificial intelligence. Escher is always current, and for nearly a century his works have been bewitching icons of the infinite possibilities of interaction between art and science.”
As Livio Negro, President of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Asti, declared: ‟ Fondazione Asti Musei is glad to offer you a journey through the mind of an artist capable of bringing art, mathematics, and philosophy together in a unique and original way. I am certain that the Escher exhibition will not only enrich the city’s cultural offerings by creating connections and stimulating a dynamic dialogue between art, science, and community, but it will actively involve us all.
Not least, the exhibition is part of a successful itinerary that has brought to Asti exhibitions dedicated to Chagall, Monet, the Impressionists in Normandy, the Macchiaioli, Giovanni Boldini, and Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit.”
The ESCHER exhibition, with the contribution granted by the Directorate General of Education, Research, and Cultural Institutes of the Ministry of Culture, has been organized by Fondazione Asti Musei, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Asti, the Region of Piedmont, and the Municipality of Asti, with the contribution of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Torino, in collaboration with Arthemisia, the M.C. Escher Foundation, and Maurits, and with the patronage of the Province of Asti.
The exhibition is supported by its sponsor il Gruppo Cassa di Risparmio di Asti and was curated by Federico Giudiceandrea, one of the world’s leading Escher experts.
THE EXHIBITION
First section – Early Period
M.C. Escher’s early works were inspired by Art Nouveau, a renowned art movement that spread throughout Europe in the late 19th century, characterized by ornamentation and decorative forms based on natural subjects. This influence was due primarily to Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, an important exponent of Dutch Art Nouveau who was Escher’s teacher at the Haarlem School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in The Netherlands. The artist has always had a deep interest in nature and has, even later, executed numerous prints with realistic depictions of flowers and insects. During his stay in Italy from 1922 to 1935 he undertook multiple trips around the country, particularly to the south, drawing monuments, landscapes, flora and fauna, which, upon his return to the studio, he transformed into graphic works: woodcuts and lithographs. In these works, mostly characterized by unusual perspectives, a meticulous observation of nature merged with views sweeping to distant horizons.
Second section – Italy
The place in question is Italy. This quote is taken from a letter written in Siena in December 1922, containing thoughts that can easily be extended to all the happy years Escher spent in Italy. The Dutch artist had visited the country for the first time with his parents in 1921. He returned the next year a second time, after finishing his studies, eventually settling in Rome in November 1923. This stay helped Escher broaden his artistic horizons, leading him to collaborate with other artists living in Rome. Every year in spring Escher undertook a journey through Italy and the Mediterranean to reproduce the magnificent landscapes, often in the company of his loyal friend and Swiss artist Giuseppe Haas-Triverio.
Escher found inspiration in nature. In a letter from Ravello, he wrote “[...] I want to find happiness in the tiniest things – a minute moss plant, two cm across, on a rock, and I want to try to do what I have been wanting to do for so long, that is, to copy these infinitesimally small things as precisely as possible [...]”. No longer prepared to put up with the increasingly oppressive Fascist regime, Escher moved first to Switzerland, in 1935, and then in 1937 to Uccle in Belgium, before relocating in 1941 to Baarn, in The Netherlands.
However, Escher and Italy had become inextricably intertwined: it was here that he got married, started a family and achieved his first professional successes. Even after reaching the artistic turning point that saw him shift his focus towards abstract subjects, in the composition of his images we can still discern frequent evocations of the Italian landscape.
Third section – Tessellations
The crucial turning point in Escher’s artistic development was his second trip to Southern Spain in 1936. On that occasion, he visited famous monuments such as the Alhambra in Granada and the Mezquita in Cordoba, from which he drew inspiration for a methodical study of the motifs used by artisans to decorate the walls and arches of Moorish architecture. He then developed a passion for tessellations: geometric decorations based on triangles, squares or hexagons that are repeated, like tiles, to cover a plane without leaving empty spaces. Working meticulously, he produced 137 watercolors, collected in a notebook, which reproduce different tessellation motifs and represent several of the 17 ways of filling a flat surface by transposing, rotating and reflecting a single tile, and included a study of various color possibilities as well. This section explores how Escher replaced the purely geometric shapes in his tessellations works with animals and human figures, which became a distinctive feature of his art, where imagination, geometry and figurative subjects are skillfully interwoven.
Fourth section – Metamorphoses
Tessellations are the basis for the cycles and the metamorphoses, a theme Escher began dealing with in 1937. For him, a metamorphosis, a word derived from the Greek, indicating a “transformation,” and specifically the transformation of one object into another of a different nature, in fact starts from the modification and subsequent concatenation of different tiles. He thus created a world in which different figures engender whirlwinds of transformations from abstract shapes to animated ones, and then back again. Escher dedicated three works to this theme, their titles making explicit use of the word: Metamorphosis I (1937), Metamorphosis II (1939-1940), and Metamorphosis III (1967-1968). Metamorphosis II and Metamorphosis III are circular universes in which a lizard can gradually the cell of a beehive, or a fish can be transformed into a bird, which in its turn becomes a cube, then a roof, and so on. The subject of the metamorphosis in his works is articulated around themes of cyclicity, eternity, and continuity – concepts he manages to transpose into tangible form through the insight of using tessellations. At times, these metamorphoses see antithetical yet complementary elements – like day and night, or good and evil – in interaction with one another, thus intertwining opposites within a single composition. The study of tessellations and the making of cycles and metamorphoses (which, moreover, can coexist in the same work, as in Cycle, Day and Night, Reptiles, or Encounter) would trigger Escher’s desire to portray the unlimited, also through the infinite subdivision of the plane, as he would do in works like Circle Limit I, II, III and IV.
Fifth section – Structure of space
From his earliest works, even more than on the pictorial element, Escher demonstrated a particular focus on the organization of the compositional space. As we have seen, from the mid-1930s onwards, he would gradually move away from the Euclidean representation of the space. His increasing interest in mathematics and geometry would go on to encompass his in-depth study of spheres, reflective surfaces and geometric solids, as well as topological surfaces such as the Möbius strip – an object perceived as a surface with two faces which, on closer inspection, is shown to have only one. We could paraphrase as follows a comment he made about the lithograph Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935): the sphere, by reflecting it, captures within itself all of the surrounding space, standing out at the center of which is the person looking at it; the individual is, therefore, at the center of this universe. Here, Escher does not conceal a certain irony as regards the artist’s ego, immortalized in a self-referential dynamic.
The examination of these concepts would lead Escher to immerse himself more than ever in the paradoxes, perspectival distortions and optical illusions that these figures enable.
Sixth section – Geometrical paradoxes
Escher’s mathematical understanding was mostly visual and intuitive. His architectural constructions and geometric compositions are remarkable for their perspectival distortions: at first sight, they may appear perfectly plausible, but after careful inspection they are revealed to be impossible. An important turning point came in 1954, the year in which a number of Escher’s prints were exhibited during the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam.
From then on, his work came to be increasingly lauded by the scientific community, and the artist entered into close collaborations with mathematicians and crystallographers, who proved to be a source of inspiration for his research into impossible structures, optical illusions and representations of infinity. This section analyzes how Escher tried to force, beyond all existing limits, the representation of impossible – albeit apparently coherent –situations, and features a selection of some of his most famous works: Ascending and Descending, Belvedere, Waterfall, Print Gallery and Relativity. These masterpieces reflect an essential aspect of the art of the Dutch graphic designer: his complex relationship with mathematics, geometry and the graphical reproduction of infinity.
Seventh section – Commissioned work
Escher was not well-known until the last years of his life, so he often worked on commissions in order to make his living. They tended to be modest projects, such as covers for concert progammes, simple greeting cards and ex-libris (decorative labels to be pasted into a book to indicate its owner). He also had more important public commissions, including for instance, designing paper money and postage stamps. In 1967 he created Metamorphosis III, a sevenmeter- long woodcut print for the Post Office in The Hague, the Netherlands. This commissioned work is considered one of his masterpieces.
Eighth section – Eschermania
Nowadays references to the works of Escher can be found in a wide range of contexts from high art to mass culture. Numerous contemporary painters and digital artists have been inspired by his work on tassellation and have interpreted it according to their own artistic languages.
The representation of paradox caught the imagination of many pop musicians and groups from the 60s, who used Escher’s images on their album covers.
His geometric world has inspired many creators of comic books and cartoon characters. The advertising world has also found fertile ground in the whimsical world of Escher, and internationally acclaimed fashion houses, such as Chanel and Alexander McQueen, have paid tribute to his imaginative universe in their couture shows. The works on display in this last section vary from comics to advertising, from music to fashion, cinema and contemporary artworks, all inspired by his art. They showcase how Eschermania has affected all creative domains and how his work is still influencing contemporary culture.
