Journey to Infinity

JOURNEY TO INFINITY is an exhibition which is showing M.C Escher works. This exhibition has 6 themes of exhibition, such as, Early Works: Art Nouveau and Nature, Tessellation, Metamorphosis, Commercial Works, Exploring Infinity and Escher Mania.

Maurits Cornelis Escher is a famous Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. He was born on 17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972.

He started his carrier by drawing nature making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants such as lichens. His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations.

EARLY WORKS: ART NOUVEAU AND NATURE

M.C Escher 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.

This is Self - Portrait of M.C Escher (1929).He learnt how to use lithograph and also he is experimenting with various printmaking techniques that included linoleum cut, woodcut.

This is Inside St. Peters (1934) which was sketching by the artist. M.C. Escher positioned himself at the highest gallery of the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, Italy in order to draw this specific perspective of the edific.

This is the sketch of Tropea, Calabria, Italy (1931). M.C. Escher travelled each spring from Rome to southern Italy, to make sketches and drawings of landscapes. He found the cliff side towns in Calabria particularly inspiring.

XXIV Emblemata is a book printed in 1932, illustrated by M.C. Escher with woodcut engravings. It contains 24 maxims written by his friend G. J. Hoogewerff, then director of the Dutch Institute of Culture in Rome.

TESSELLATION

M. C Escher 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.

M.C. Escher got his inspiration from the Alhambra Palace’s patterns, as well as from a Japanese illustration (in the middle of the top row). He then transformed the usual geometric Islamic patterns into figurative shapes to represent insects and birds.

This sea horses pattern is part of M.C. Escher’s symmetrical drawings. From these drawings, he developed a mathematical approach to the representations of symmetry and in 1937 created woodcuts based on them.

In this remarkable work, M.C. Escher represented more than 40 different figures embedded into each other creating a unique effect.

METAMORPHOSIS

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. At times, transformations lead to opposite combinations such as day and night, or good and evil.

The print is divided into two equivalent parts: the black color representing the birds transformed into the sea opposed to the white tint of the fishes gradually morphing into the sky.

M.C. Escher created this self-portrait in his studio in Roma, Italy which is entirely reflected into the sphere.

This masterpiece of M.C. Escher begins with the word metamorphose in a black rectangle, followed by smaller metamorphic forming geometries from grid to checkered pattern, which then become tessellation of different animals, transforming into blocks, rectangles and architecture, where shapes finally transmute into the word metamorphose.

COMMERCIAL WORKS

M.C. Escher was regularly commissioned to make artworks by officials and admirers around the world. He also received more modest requests, from a concert programme cover to simple greeting cards and ex-libris. M.C. Escher paid equal attention to these more minor commissions, adapting his large compositions language to suit smaller scale projects.

This box has been produced in series for Verblifa, a Dutch company celebrating its 75th anniversary.

It has 20 faces (icosahedron) and is decorated with repeating pattern of sea-shells and starfish in print and embossed relief.

The Netherlands post office commissioned M.C. Escher to design stamps for the 75th anniversary of the World Postal Union.

EXPLORING INFINITY

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. These masterpieces reflect an essential aspect of his art: its intricate relation to mathematics and endless compositions.

The Möbius strip has the mathematical property of being non-orientable, it has only one side and only one edge.

Through a subtle mix of perspective based on three different points, M.C. Escher managed to have three different worlds sharing the same space creating a strange yet realistic composition.

In this work, it appears that the monks are on a staircase that is simultaneously ascending and descending, creating one of his most famous, paradoxical constructions.

The Print Gallery lithograph epitomises the intersection of Art and Mathematics. When M.C. Escher completed this work in 1956, he was challenged by the laws of perspective when drawing the picture repeating itself endlessly in its centre.

ESCHER MANIA

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.

The rock band Pink Floyd was fond of M.C. Escher and created an infinite reflection on the cover of their album Ummagumma in 1969, a tribute to his work.

Published by Dark Horse Comics, this story immerses the rather gothic Madman Jam into the enigmatic world of M.C. Escher.

This Dutch artist, Hans Kuiper has an impressive graphic oeuvre and has patented a computerized system to produce automatic tessellation.

Richard Hassell, co-founder of the Singapore-based architectural practice WOHA, is passionate about M.C. Escher’s work and has created this unique Fish Scales tessellation work for this Exhibition.

GALLERY INTERIOR

Journey to Infinity is one of interesting exhibition. It is because, there are some ways to create a graphic design artwork. M.C Escher has been my inspiration how to create a wonderful graphic design artwork. He was using lithograph, water colors, wood cut and digital print to create new graphic design which is unique and memorable.

Although, his works are using sketches, his works has characteristic which is different with others.

Moreover, I also like the interior of the gallery. It is very organized with different colors of paint. With different colors lf paint, it can help people to distinguish every theme in the exhibition.