The Amazing World of M. C. Escher, Dulwich Picture Gallery

The King of magnificent detailed drawings and intricate geometrical impossibilities, M. C. Escher, has amazingly never had a major exhibition in the UK. But Dulwich Picture Gallery is changing all that with a spectacular show of nearly 100 of the master Dutch draughtsman's woodcuts, lithographs, drawings, watercolours and mezzotints as well as exclusive archival material, to celebrate his immense influence on 20^th century visual culture.

Who was M. C. Escher? Biography

Escher’s career began as an architect-in-training in Haarlem, Holland, where a teacher recognised his drawing talents and suggested he transfer to studying Graphic Arts. Even in Escher's early prints and drawings you'll find on display, his voracious appetite for experimentation with perspectives, patterns and surreal motifs is apparent.

In his life Escher witnessed to two World Wars and numerous scientific and mathematic advancements, but always preserved a unique style which took his work into new mathematical and creative realms. At the same time, the political instability in Europe during Escher’s life echoes throughout his work, particularly in the turbulent eccentricity of his compositions. By the 1960s, as the French revolution simmered and social change in the West unfolded dramatically, the demand for copies of his Escher’s prints went stratospheric.

Highlights : M. C. Escher art

This Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition showcases some of Escher’s most iconic images – the mad staircases and mind-games of Relativity (l1953); the chequer-patterned country fields morphing into a flock of birds in Day and Night (woodcut, 1938), and the swirling skin-like formations that outline an optical illusion of three-dimensional human heads in Bond of Union (lithograph, 1956).

Escher was a rare combination of technical genius and artistic visionary, and if his works have received less attention in the decades following his death, this exhibition looks set to change that radically.