When the Akron Art Museum was asked to host “M.C Escher: Impossible Realities,” one of the most coveted exhibitions of the year on loan from Athens, Greece, museum curator Ellen Rudolph jumped at the chance.

“Escher’s attention to detail,” she says, “and the overall quality of his work, is unsurpassed.”

For this world-renowned graphic artist easily fascinates his fans through mind puzzles and questions of relativity and infinity, creating more of an experience than an exhibit.

“Are you really sure that floor can’t also be a ceiling?” Escher once asked, leading his audience through a metamorphosis of higher understanding.

That guiding light comes in handy while viewing the exhibit. Getting lost in Escher’s works is almost inevitable, as the expanse of his detail is mind-boggling. Tracking staircases into oblivion, and following tessellations as they turn from fish to bird and back again, one could spend the better part of an hour with a single print.

The exhibit is on loan from the Herakleidon Museum and features 130 original prints and pieces from the extensive collection housed there. Through May 29, the Akron Art Museum offers patrons a glimpse of the thought processes of this enigmatic artist, as well as rarely seen originals.

Escher’s works are testament to the fact that printmaking requires a much different artistic methodology than painting or drawing: The image must be almost entirely conceived in the mind of the artist and then etched out of stone or wood block in painstaking, measured detail. With no “Undo” or “Erase” button so prevalent in today’s computer-aided design, Escher, who died in 1972 at age 74, was truly a pioneer in graphic arts. As a visual learner with no formal mathematical training, his ability to conceive precise patterns was largely, and impressively, intuitive.

The artist began his career drawing landscapes of the Italian countryside. “Actually,” says Rudolph, “nearly half his artistic outputs are landscape drawings, which are hardly ever seen or even noted.”

During Escher’s lifetime, his most recognizable works repeatedly slipped in and out of fashion. Stylistically, he stood alone, translating his love of the pastoral into the neat and ordered black and white sequence of his prints.

Escher produced work in the modern-art era, but wasn’t interested in the abstract. Instead, as his world grew increasingly unpredictable, he turned inward for order and tried to create a method to its madness.

“He was interested in portraying the cycles of life through his patterns and tessellations as well as perhaps trying to impose order in a world of chaos,” Rudolph suggests, citing both the world wars Escher lived through and the atrocities he witnessed as influence.

Not only does the exhibit display some of Escher’s most famous pieces, including “Drawing Hands” and the remarkable spirals which take human form in “Bond of Union,” it showcases the ingenuity of the artist himself. Highlights include conceptual ideas mapped out on graph paper with notes penciled in the corners and multiple studies of the same print. The exhibit also spotlights never-before-seen 3-D models of Escher’s “impossible buildings,” including the famous “Belvedere,” and patrons are invited to look through a vantage point in which the illusion becomes whole.

While some art critics argue that Escher is an intellectual rather than a true artist, categorizing him seems futile. His work is art and beyond. It is a mathematical equation, a science of precision, an awesome visual puzzle meant to question relativity. It is the aesthetic value of the spatial illusions that makes his art a modern classic.

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WHEN YOU GO
“M.C Escher: Impossible Realities” | Akron Art Museum, 1 South High Street, Akron 44308 | 330/376-9185 • akronartmuseum.org