Balcony

Balcony is one of the first prints that Escher created after the Second World War. For this lithograph, he revisited a journey he had made to the small town of Senglea on Malta in 1935. Escher used the view of the town’s houses and their balconies as a basis. The centre of the print has the illusion of bulging outwards, as if a magnifying glass is lying on top of it. Escher’s fascination with spherical mirrors is clearly evident here once again. It seems as if someone has pushed a spherical shape into the back of the print and the otherwise so realistically rendered town is thus distorted. Although the bulge appears realistic, the paper remains wholly flat. With these kinds of illusions, Escher wanted to make the viewer aware that spatial representation on paper is fiction, a proposed reality.