After a decade-long absence, the visionary genius of Maurits Cornelis Escher returns to the city with M.C. Escher – Between Art and Science, the new exhibition at MUDEC running from September 25, 2025, to February 8, 2026. We step into Escher’s fascinating labyrinth of geometry and imagination, and take a look at his impossible staircases, endless metamorphoses, and dreamlike tessellations with the lens of science, math, geometry and crystallography, as a reminder that logic and wonder can dance together.
The show spans 8 rooms with an additional, immersive installation, and features a shitload of original works, from etching to drawings to watercolours. Let’s see what it’s about.
A Mind Between Worlds
There’s a rare kind of artist who can make mathematics feel alive, who can transform the cool precision of geometry into something almost lyrical. Maurits Cornelis Escher was one of them. His art was about exploring what the eye — and the mind — could imagine through impossible architectures, optical illusions, and metamorphic worlds.
The exhibition M.C. Escher – Between Art and Science unfolds like a journey through an intellect that refused to draw boundaries between disciplines and reveals an artist fascinated by rhythm, symmetry, and the patterns that govern both art and nature. The exhibition places his work in conversation with Islamic ornamentation — the intricate mosaics of the Alhambra and the Mezquita of Córdoba — where Escher first encountered the mesmerising logic of repetition. These encounters became the seed of his own graphic universe: a world where shapes evolve, space folds back on itself, and reality is never quite what it seems, and that’s why it makes total sense for this show to be hosted at the MUDEC, the Cultures Museum.
The exhibition’s eight sections trace this evolution from the lyrical lines of his Art Nouveau beginnings to the rigorous visual puzzles of his later years. Alongside his famous prints are sketches, studies, and archival materials that open a window into his method both scientific and poetic. Even without formal training in mathematics, Escher managed to visualize the invisible: infinity, transformation, the impossible loop.
By setting Escher’s works next to those of his artistic forebears and sources of inspiration, the curators create a dialogue that feels almost timeless, and it’s about resonance: between East and West, logic and intuition, art and science. In that intersection lies the enduring magic of Escher: his ability to make us see structure as beauty, and beauty as structure.
1. The Young Years
Escher’s path to mastery began with failure. After a few uncertain steps in his academic studies, he turned to graphic art and, within it, he found a way to give form to the hidden order of the visible world. Under the guidance of Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita at the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, Escher discovered the discipline of line, the elegance of form, and the beauty of precision, which became the scaffolding of his imagination.
The early works already reveal his restless curiosity. From the fluid naturalism of Birds to the spiritual rhythms of The Six Days of Creation (1926), one can glimpse the seeds of the visual logic that would later define him. Escher’s fascination with repetition and movement also drew from unexpected sources, notably the Japanese print Under the Wave off Kanagawa (1830) by Hokusai, a reproduction of which hung in his father’s home. That image of perpetual motion left its mark on him, inspiring the sense of rhythm that animates even his most static compositions.
As a young engraver, Escher experimented with linoleum, a soft, pliable material that allowed for precision yet invited improvisation. In those early engravings, between the natural and the symbolic, one can already sense the artist’s distinct voice taking shape: his love of structure, his refusal of disorder, and his quiet obsession with the infinite possibilities of form. What began as a means to represent the world soon evolved into a way of reimagining it through patterns, paradoxes, and pure invention.
Behind Escher’s fascination with impossible spaces stood Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita — artist, printmaker, and mentor — whose sensibility was steeped in the traditions of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Vienna Secession, and the Dutch Liberty style. From him, Escher absorbed the idea that a line was never merely a contour: it was an act of balance between form and emptiness, where even the background had a voice.
De Mesquita’s own work celebrated nature’s geometry such as the intertwining of leaves, the pulse of organic patterns, the quiet discipline of decoration. His influence guided Escher toward the notion that ornament could be both playful and profound. The “tessellation,” the principle of dividing a plane into repeating shapes that fit perfectly together, emerged from this decorative logic. It echoed the textile designs of William Morris, Kolo Moser, and Richard Roland Holst, yet in Escher’s hands, it became something else: a visual philosophy, a way of thinking in patterns.
In Escher’s early engravings, this inheritance is unmistakable. The page becomes a field alive with motion, filled to its edges with signs, figures, and rhythms that repeat yet never grow dull. Every shape calls to another; every line locks into place with mathematical precision and artistic grace. Through De Mesquita, Escher learned an approach to ornament that’s never superficial but structural. And from that foundation, he began to construct the impossible worlds we now recognise instantly as his own.
Early Work: Ex Libris for Bastiaan Kist (1916)
Among Escher’s earliest surviving works, Ex Libris for Bastiaan Kist already reveals the young artist’s fascination with symbolism, mortality, and design as storytelling. Created in 1916, this linoleum print in red and black — carved from two separate blocks — was made as a personalised bookplate for his friend Bastiaan Kist.
At first glance, the image is striking: a skeleton astride a coffin, both playful and unsettling. It evokes the medieval motif of the danse macabre, the dance of death, yet Escher’s treatment of the theme feels less moralistic than intellectual, as if he were already testing how order, symmetry, and irony could coexist within a single frame.
The work also hints at his early engagement with European artistic influences, and it’s reminiscent of Alberto Martini’s La danza macabra europea (1914–1916), particularly La vittoria gialla, with its skeletal imagery and theatrical tone. Even at this early stage, Escher was learning how to merge precision with wit, geometry with allegory, qualities that would later define his mature art.
2. The Italian Grand Tour
Between 1922 and 1935, Escher’s traditional journey of a wealthy young man led him south. When he settled in Rome in 1923, Italy was a lens through which he learned to see: the rugged topographies of the Amalfi Coast, the labyrinthine streets of Siena, the sunlit arches of the Eternal City, all entered his work as problems of structure, rhythm, composition, and light.
During these years, Escher’s art underwent a quiet but profound transformation. The landscapes he engraved and drew are not romantic visions of Italy: mountains become geometry, villages align like tessellations, and the contrast between light and shadow feels architectural. In his hands, the Italian landscape becomes a construction.
This period also foreshadows the conceptual shift that would later define his mature work: by studying the built environment with such precision, Escher trained his eye to see how the real world could fold into the imagined one just like the architect in Inception. The transition from observation to invention — from hills to paradoxes — begins here. You can already sense it in Still Life and Street (1937), where a simple tabletop morphs seamlessly into an urban vista. Reality and illusion are partners in a visual dialogue.
During his Roman years, he found himself surrounded by a culture steeped in centuries of dialogue between art and science, rigour and fantasy. He engaged with local printmakers and intellectual circles such as the Gruppo Romano Incisori Artisti, absorbed the visual debates that filled the pages of magazines like L’Eroica, and encountered a network of historians, critics, and theoreticians who helped him situate his craft within a broader lineage. This was also a time of study and reflection. Escher explored the precision of the ancient Netherlandish masters, the luminous realism of Roman vedutismo, and above all, the visionary worlds of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. From Piranesi, he inherited architectural motifs and learned how to turn space into a paradox. The crumbling arches and impossible staircases of the Carceri d’Invenzione resonated deeply with him, offering a language through which he could blend the strictness of geometry with the mystery of imagination.
On a personal level, Italy was his place of harmony. It’s where he married, raised his family, and honed his craft in the quiet rigour of daily work. Many biographers suggest that these were his happiest years: a time when Escher’s life and art found their own equilibrium, suspended between sunlight and shadow, reason and reverie.
3. The Turning Point in Granada
Before the infinite staircases and impossible architectures, along came Granada. In the autumn of 1922, a young M.C. Escher arrived in Spain and stepped into the Alhambra without expecting much, in his own words. What he found was a place where mathematics and beauty coexist so naturally that they seem one and the same: the Moorish mosaics that covered the palace walls, endlessly repeating yet never monotonous, struck him like a revelation. It was here that Escher discovered a geometry alive with rhythm and a decorative logic that felt close to music (because it was math).
At that stage, his fascination was still intuitive. The works he created in the years that followed, before his return to the Alhambra fourteen years later, show an artist exploring the edges of modular repetition without yet surrendering fully to it. His experiments with tessellation were driven as much by craft as by curiosity: repeating motifs made the most of his materials and his time, but they also gave him a framework for invention. The act of engraving itself — carving and re-carving patterns into wood or linoleum — became a dialogue between control and chance.
Escher’s fascination with this world found resonance in the mathematical treatises of scholars such as Abū al-Wafā’ al-Būzjānī (940–998), whose writings described “ingenious procedures” for solving geometric problems that are the very foundations for creating intricate mosaics, inlays, and ornamental woodwork. These ideas, born from a culture where mathematicians, artisans, and architects collaborated freely, offered Escher a model of how science and art could speak the same language.
These early explorations, though modest, reveal the seeds of a transformation. Escher began to move beyond simple symmetry toward rotation, reflection, and visual rhythm and the language that would eventually define his art. The influence of Islamic ornamentation lingered quietly in his imagination, reshaping the way he thought about space and repetition. Even before his great stylistic breakthrough, the Alhambra had planted something permanent in him: the conviction that order could be infinitely inventive.
When he would return to Spain more than a decade later, that first spark would ignite into a system that turned the principles of Moorish design into the grammar of the impossible. But even in 1922, with sketchbook in hand and eyes wide open to the tiled perfection around him, Escher had already begun to glimpse the infinite.
4. The Birth of a Visual Grammar
By the mid-1930s, after returning to Granada for a second time, Escher’s fascination with Islamic ornamentation crystallised (pun intended) into something entirely his own. What had begun as admiration for Moorish mosaics evolved into a lifelong investigation for both a method and a language. From the decorative patterns of the Alhambra, he derived an original approach to tessellation: the subdivision of the plane into figures that fit together perfectly, without gaps or overlaps. Unlike the geometric abstraction of his sources, Escher’s imagination brought these forms to life, and his lines began to move, transform, and breathe the aura of metamorphosis.
From this revelation emerged what he would later call his “visual grammar”: a system through which geometry became animation. In his studies and watercolours from the late 1920s to the 1970s, Escher experimented with an astonishing range of motifs: birds that morph into fish, lizards that slip across the page and fold into stars, human figures that emerge from mathematical grids. Each drawing is both playful and precise, a small laboratory of transformation where art meets logic head-on.
Among the most remarkable examples is Free Plane-Filling, Based on a Rectangular System, with 36 Different Motifs (1951), a meticulous exploration of how diverse forms — zoomorphic, botanical, or purely geometric — can coexist within a single ordered space. Far from decorative indulgences, these tassellations were instruments of inquiry into reality and the geometry we use to describe it. Escher tested the invisible rules that govern the visible world: translation, rotation, reflection, and glide symmetry.
This period marks the moment Escher ceased to be merely inspired by Islamic art and began to stand beside it as a kindred spirit. Working independently, he constructed an entirely new universe governed by logic, rhythm, and transformation. What had started as the study of ornament had become a meditation on the infinite: a world where the boundaries between mathematics and imagination disappeared altogether.
Magic Mirror (1946)
At first glance, Magic Mirror looks like a puzzle in motion: a swarm of gryffins spills out of a reflective world, transform in 2d and, through the mirror, go full circle again. On the tiled floor, a seamless pattern of flat, bird-like silhouettes begins to rise into three dimensions, taking shape as sculptural forms. These creatures march toward a standing mirror, only to emerge from its surface as solid, winged beings that circle back into the scene. The mirror becomes a portal, a boundary between dimensions, and a way for Escher’s constant fascination with dualities: reality and illusion, flatness and depth, logic and imagination. Created in 1946, this lithograph is one of Escher’s most emblematic explorations of transformation and perception between 2d and 3d.
The work also echoes the artist’s enduring dialogue with mathematics. The precise grid underfoot acts as a silent scaffolding for transformation, grounding fantasy in structure. Within this rigorous order, Escher allows metamorphosis to unfold freely in an intricate ballet of geometry and life. In Magic Mirror, Escher demonstrates the culmination of decades of inquiry: the merging of scientific reasoning and visual poetry. It’s a world governed by logic yet animated by wonder.
5. Cycles and Metamorphoses
By the late 1930s, Escher’s fascination with geometry had evolved into a meditation on change itself. The idea of transformation, which had long been implicit in his tessellations and optical structures, now took centre stage and, in these years, Escher began to breathe life into the abstract: shapes became symbols, patterns turned into creatures, and the static discipline of geometry unfurled into the movement of creatures and characters. Repetition became metamorphosis.
The first great expression of this shift came in Metamorphosis I (1937), where the artist used tessellation not merely as an exercise in symmetry, but as a narrative device: a realistic image of the Italian coastal town of Atrani gradually dissolves into a sequence of geometric transformations until the city itself seems to reconfigure into an abstract motif. The transition is seamless, as if reality were rearranging its own atoms. In Escher’s world, nothing ends; everything becomes something else.
Two years later, with Metamorphosis II (1939–1940), Escher expanded this concept into an epic visual continuum once again involving Atrani, yet this time not as the starting point but as the culmination of an endless cycle of transformations that connect animals, architecture, and geometry. The work begins and ends with the word metamorphose to make the exercise explicit. Within that loop, birds turn into fish, fish into cubes, cubes into cities, and the cities back into words.
These metamorphoses mark the full maturity of his visual language. In them, Escher articulates the great philosophical questions that haunted his generation: how to represent time, how to visualise infinity, how to reconcile opposites without destroying their balance. His images suggest that opposites are not contradictions but partners in an endless dialogue like day and night, air and water, logic and wonder.
What makes these works so mesmerising is their rhythm: a calm, deliberate pulse that mirrors the cycles of nature itself, without any violence in the transformation, without rupture between one state and the next. Only the elegant flow of geometry.
6. Mathematics and Geometry
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher whose work bridged art and science. Best known for his collections La Jeune Parque and Charmes, Valéry saw creativity as a disciplined form of intellect and a process of reasoning through beauty. For Valéry, art was not the opposite of science but its poetic counterpart: both sought to reveal the hidden order of the world. His belief that mathematics could be “comparable to dance” reflects this philosophy — the idea that even the most rigorous structures can move with grace, and that precision, far from stifling imagination, can set it free. In his Cahiers (Notebooks), which he kept for more than fifty years, he explored mathematics, physics, language, and perception with the same curiosity he applied to poetry. This room opens with a quotation from one of these notebooks:
“Mathematics,” he wrote, “is practice, and is comparable to dance.”
It’s a fitting epigraph for Escher, an artist who, though never formally trained in mathematics, moved through it with the same grace and curiosity that a dancer brings to the stage. For Escher, geometry was never a cold science of numbers and equations; it was rhythm, movement, and transformation. His drawings were not the diagrams of a theorist but the choreographies of an explorer.
Just as Valéry saw in dance the perfect expression of thought embodied, Escher saw in mathematics the embodied logic of beauty. His compositions — the spirals, tessellations, and recursive forms — perform their own silent ballet and each figure, each mirrored curve, seems to move in time through a proportion that echoes its construction movement. This sense of mathematics as a living art form became one of the defining undercurrents of his career.
Enters Crystallography
In 1937, Escher began a period of systematic study that would shape the next phase of his work. Without any formal mathematical education, he delved into scientific journals on crystallography — the study of how atoms organize into repeating structures. Among the articles that caught his attention was a 1923 essay by a German physicist who examined the regular divisions of the plane which is the mathematical basis for tessellation.
The physicist was Friedrich Haag (1882–1945), a crystallographer whose early 20th-century research helped define the mathematical underpinnings of pattern and symmetry. In 1923, he published a pivotal article on the regular divisions of the plane, a study of how geometric figures can be arranged without gaps or overlaps, and his work offered a visual logic to crystalline structures, showing how natural order could be expressed through repetition and transformation. Though his writings were aimed at specialists, their clarity and precision made them accessible to visual thinkers like Escher, who found in Haag’s diagrams the structural rhythm that would become the foundation of his own visual grammar.
Even more influential was the Hungarian mathematician György Pólya, whose 1924 work on the classification of the 17 plane symmetry groups laid out the theoretical foundation for all two-dimensional repeating patterns.
György Pólya (1887–1985) was a Hungarian mathematician whose work profoundly influenced both mathematical theory and education. A pioneer in problem-solving and mathematical reasoning, Pólya is best known for his book How to Solve It (1945), which offered a systematic approach to creative thinking and remains a cornerstone of mathematical pedagogy. His earlier research, however, was equally transformative: in the 1920s, he investigated plane symmetry and crystallographic groups, identifying the seventeen possible ways a two-dimensional pattern can repeat without gaps, a classification that became foundational to crystallography and later to M.C. Escher’s art. While Pólya’s writings bridged the gap between abstract logic and intuition, he offered a framework in which mathematics could be both exact and imaginative, an idea that resonated deeply with Escher’s visual exploration of order, rhythm, and infinity.
Between 1937 and 1941, he translated these principles into sketches and studies that culminated two decades later in his essay Regular Division of the Plane (1958), a clear, elegant exposition of the logic behind his visual experiments.
7. Infinity
By the 1950s, M.C. Escher had already conquered a visible world made of perspective, pattern, reflection, and metamorphosis. What remained was the final and most elusive frontier: infinity. How could one represent the limitless within the confines of a sheet of paper? It was a question both philosophical and mathematical, and for Escher, it became a lifelong pursuit.
His answer of course lay in geometry, but not the familiar, flat geometry of Euclid. Instead, Escher turned to the strange and exhilarating logic of non-Euclidean space, where parallel lines curve, distance stretches, and the boundaries of the possible blur. Through this new lens, the plane itself became elastic, capable of holding the infinite.
The revelation came during his exploration of hyperbolic tessellations — repeating patterns that shrink toward the edges of a circular boundary without ever quite reaching them — that led him to the discovery of a paradox: a finite image capable of suggesting endlessness. Each motif grows smaller and smaller as it approaches the rim, until it reaches what he called “the limit of infinite smallness.” Infinity, in Escher’s hands, was intimate, contained, and ordered.
A decisive moment in this journey arrived in 1954, when Escher met Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter, the Canadian mathematician known for his work in geometry and symmetry. Coxeter introduced him to the concept of the Poincaré disk, a model of hyperbolic space in which the infinite is projected within a circle. To Escher, this was a revelation and a way to give visible form to the infinite itself. Their correspondence marked the beginning of a radical new phase in his work.
Between 1958 and 1960, Escher created the Circle Limit series (I, II, III, and IV), his most sophisticated synthesis of art and mathematics. Within these prints, fish, angels, and demons radiate outward from the centre, becoming smaller as they approach the circular edge, yet never quite reaching it. The outer border, in the Poincaré model, represents infinity — an unreachable horizon that nonetheless defines the space within — and this perfect paradox was both structure and freedom: an infinite dance enclosed within a finite frame.
9. Commissions and Other Stuff
After an immersive room with mirrors that will make you dizzy (and be warned that it might make you sick), the exhibition closes up with a room dedicated to some works he did on commission.
The works he accepted to make a living — practical assignments such as wrapping paper or greeting cards — became acts of exploration, opportunities to refine and test his visual language against the demands of the real world. Over the years, Escher adapted his research on tessellation and transformation to a variety of media: wrapping paper and fabrics being the most obvious, but also banknotes and architectural decorations. Each work, whether destined for a gallery or a printing press, carried the same structural integrity, the same harmony between logic and imagination. His repeating figures — birds, fish, lizards, or abstract motifs — became decorative without ever becoming trivial. Even when printed on humble materials, they retained their precision and their quiet, mathematical poetry.
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