With over 120 prints in our museum, the most famous works from the oeuvre of M.C. Escher (1898-1972) are permanently on display at Escher in The Palace. These magnificent prints are being exhibited in a regal setting: the former winter palace of Queen Emma, the Queen Mother.
How to depict infinity on paper? This was a question that exercised the minds of both M.C. Escher and Albert E. Bosman. Albert E. Bosman (1891-1961) was a multitalented engineer who was keen to make mathematics and geometry accessible. He was not only a maths teacher, but also an enthusiastic artist who drew inspiration from his area of expertise. Bosman and Escher were neighbours in Baarn (NL) from 1944 to 1961. They shared a deep fascination with mathematical concepts and both explored limits and the finite and infinite in their work.
The sculptures of Jehoshua Rozenman (b. 1955) are not as they first appear. They look robust, monumental, but they are in fact made of fragile glass. These mysterious pieces resemble impossible, secretive buildings that seem to come from another dimension. It is in the tension between fantasy and reality that Jehoshua Rozenman and M.C. Escher meet.
Printmaker Anne Desmet (b. 1964) creates razor-sharp prints in which she plays with perspective and architecture. Like Escher, she excels in transformations and metamorphoses. She too created her first architectural work in Italy, and this had a lasting impact on her later urban landscapes.
Maurits Cornelis Escher achieved world-wide fame with his optical illusions but it is less well known that he also made art for public spaces. In 1959-60, he designed a tile tableau with fish and birds, inspired by his famous print Sky and Water I (1938), for a villa in the south of Amsterdam.
The talented Julie de Graag was one of Escher’s contemporaries, who died exactly 100 years ago this year. She shared a love of nature with M.C. Escher. Her woodcuts managed, in just a few details, to capture the essence of plants, animals and portrait subjects. De Graag’s work will be shown at Escher in The Palace alongside that of Escher.
An extraordinary find led Joris Escher to a voyage of discovery into the life and work of his great-uncle, Maurits Cornelis Escher. Among family heirlooms, Joris found a Chinese lacquerware box containing ivory puzzles. Hidden in the bottom he found some drawings by M.C. Escher and his father, Joris’s great-grandfather. Escher in The Palace is to show them for the first time in an exhibition entitled Becoming Escher.