There's a particular kind of vertigo you get standing in front of a picture by M.C. Escher. Your brain insists it understands what it's seeing, then quietly panics when the logic refuses to resolve.
Staircases ascend forever. Hands draw each other into existence. Birds become fish become birds again. It's not a trick, exactly: it's something stranger and more unsettling. The feeling that the rules you thought governed reality have been politely, bur firmly, suspended. It's like the best optical illusions meeting art.
Maurits Cornelis Escher was a Dutch graphic artist born in 1898 who spent his career producing woodcuts, lithographs and mezzotints of almost supernatural precision. He was, in the conventional sense, neither a mathematician nor a scientist; he described his own mathematical knowledge as largely visual and intuitive.
What he was, with no real precedent and no obvious successor, was a man who used printmaking to explore infinity, paradox and the architecture of impossible spaces.
His images became cultural touchstones, reproduced on album covers and blacklight posters, referenced in films and cartoons, pinned to student bedroom walls across several decades. Architects, physicists and graphic designers all claimed him. He was, and remains, genuinely difficult to categorise, which is part of the reason his influence continues to this day.
Added value
In 2026, that refusal to be categorised is more valuable than ever. We live, let's remember, in a visual culture of extraordinary abundance yet remarkable sameness. Frictionless generation means images are produced at industrial scale, by systems that have learned what images tend to look like.
Into this blandscape arrives M.C. Escher: The Exhibition, at London's Somerset House. The largest show of his work ever staged in the UK, it's a timely reminder that the most interesting visual thinking doesn't optimise for anything. It just follows its obsessions, wherever they lead.
Escher himself described his work as "a game; a very serious game". That uneasy juxtaposition – playful on the surface, ferociously rigorous underneath – is exactly what makes it feel so alive, more than 50 years after his death. And it's exactly what the Somerset House show, with over 150 original works spanning his entire career, communicates with real force.
From Italy to infinity
The exhibition traces Escher's development from the beginning, and it's worth spending time in the early rooms. The Italian landscapes and architectural drawings from his years in Rome (1923 to 1935) show a young artist developing extraordinary technical precision, and a habit of looking at the world from unusual angles: vertiginous viewpoints, compressed perspectives, staircases that already seem to harbour ambitions beyond their station.
The decisive shift came in 1936, when a visit to the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, ignited his obsession with tessellations; the seamless interlocking of repeating forms that would define his mature work. He produced 137 watercolours cataloguing the possibilities. These metamorphoses, in which fish become birds, day dissolves into night, and geometric forms morph through every iteration, feel less like illustration than like a man trying to think his way to the edge of what vision can contain.
By the 1950s, his dialogue with mathematicians was producing some of the most intellectually charged images in the history of printmaking. His geometric paradoxes – buildings that are simultaneously plausible and impossible – came directly from his engagement with ideas about perception, infinity and the structure of space.
Counterculture hero
The final section of the exhibition, titled Eschermania, makes the cultural case with infectious enthusiasm. Escher was reportedly bemused when the counterculture adopted him in the 1960s. But there's no denying that his images were everywhere: blacklight posters, album covers (the Mott the Hoople debut among them), student bedroom walls. Pink Floyd used his work. Later, The Simpsons and Futurama riffed on it. The staircase from the movie Labyrinth owes him an obvious debt.
For creatives, this section is particularly interesting. Escher's reach across disciplines, mathematics, physics, graphic design, film, music, architecture, happened not because he was trying to appeal to any of those audiences but because his obsessions were universal. Infinity, paradox, the gap between what we see and what exists: these turn out to matter to everyone.
The show's immersive rooms add another dimension. The Relativity Room plays with scale in ways that are immediately disorienting; the interactive Print Gallery lets you explore the famous 1956 lithograph, its central blank eventually completed by a team of mathematicians 50 years later, in a way that a flat reproduction never allows. Standing inside an Escher is a different experience from looking at one.
M.C. Escher: The Exhibition is at Somerset House, Embankment Galleries, until 6 September. Tickets from £12 at london-mc.escher-expo.com. And if you're free this Wednesday, 17 June, the artist's 128th birthday, Fever is offering 15% off entry for the day.
