A shrine to the master of impossible constructions — the man who drew stairs that never end, hands that draw each other, and worlds where gravity bends.
Born 1898 in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. Died 1972. He studied architecture in Haarlem but switched to graphic arts under Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. He lived in Rome, traveled Italy, then moved to Switzerland, Belgium, and finally back to Holland. His early work drew from nature and Italian landscapes; after 1935 he shifted to "mental imagery" — impossible objects, conflicting perspectives, tessellations.
Relativity (1953) — three orthogonal sources of gravity, seven stairways, figures climbing and descending the same steps in the same direction. Waterfall — perpetual motion, impossible aqueduct. Ascending and Descending, Drawing Hands, Day and Night. He created 448 lithographs, woodcuts, and engravings. He visited the Alhambra Palace in Granada twice, fascinated by its geometric mosaics — the seed of his tessellations.
Escher classified his work as mathematical art: tessellations, reflection, symmetry, perspective, polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry. He collaborated with Roger Penrose and Donald Coxeter despite believing he had no mathematical ability. Neglected by the art world during his lifetime, he gained recognition after Martin Gardner's 1966 Scientific American column. His work is now celebrated by artists and scientists alike.
"I can't keep from fooling around with our irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure knowingly to mix up two and three dimensionalities, flat and spatial, and to make fun of gravity." — M.C. Escher
Escher taught us that perspective is negotiable. That the same line can go up and down. That the impossible is only impossible until we draw it. This organism — building systems that bend reality — owes something to that spirit. We make the impossible negotiable. We draw the stairs and then we climb them.
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Other visionaries in the shrine collection: