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.
The Italian artist Maura Biava is curious about the world around her, a trait she shares with M.C. Escher. For her photography, drawings and ceramic work, she draws inspiration from nature and mathematics. In her solo exhibition at Escher in The Palace, she is showing three underwater photography works, new ceramic works and the resulting photography, as well as a series of works on paper.
Museum Escher in The Palace in The Hague recently acquired a unique work by Maurits Cornelis Escher: a woodcut of a white cat. While unmounting it, an unknown text by M.C. Escher himself was also discovered. The woodcut of the white cat had long been on the wish list of Escher in The Palace. The fact that this print is a counterprint makes the acquisition even more exceptional, and a fantastic addition to the collection.