CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/1/2024

Technique, beauty, illusions and dreams, long before AI

“We adore chaos because we love to produce order.” So said Dutch graphic artist and geometric-mathematical savant M.C. Escher, known throughout the world for his disturbing, enigmatic works featuring tessellations, perspectival paradoxes, twists of logic and visual puzzles. In this bold new silver-covered monograph, published to accompany a major exhibition of the artist’s work in Italy, all of Escher’s most important and classic woodcuts, lithographs, linocuts, mezzotints and wood engravings are collected, with a special emphasis on works produced during his formative twelve-year period in Italy, where he lived from 1922 until 1935. “This exhibition is all about technique, beauty, illusions and dreams,” M.C. Escher Foundation President Mark Veldhuysen writes, reminding those of us who grew up in the age of computers, smartphones, video games and now AI, “in Escher’s days, computers didn’t exist and everything you see is handmade.” New from Skira, read more about the book here.