In Three Worlds (1955), Escher showcases his fascination with nature and reflections. This print is the result of his many walks through the woods around his hometown Baarn. The reflective surfaces of ponds, lakes and mud puddles were a source of inspiration for Escher. In this print he naturally links three worlds together: the fish under water, the leaves floating on the surface, and the reflection of the trees in the water. In doing so, he creates a layered three-dimensional world in a one-dimensional work.

In several of his prints, Escher deliberately fooled his audience by dressing up his impossibilities in such a way that – at first sight anyway – they could actually exist. Belvedere is a stellar example. It is a three-dimensional building that can be drawn on a flat surface without any problems, but is impossible as a spatial figure. Escher illustrates this contradiction beautifully with the little man on the bench. In front of him lies a drawing of an impossible cube, a shape that can exist on paper but not in real life. Yet he is holding such a cube in his hands. Here, Escher combines several variations of impossibility in one image. However, he does so in a very subtle way. He challenges the viewer to consider what is possible and what is not. Look at the top of the building and at the bottom, with the terrace, the walls, the dungeon and the staircase. Two images with respectively correct perspectives are combined into an impossible whole by the ladder and the columns.

In Day and Night, white and black birds fly over a Dutch landscape. The white birds fly to the right, through the night. From this dark sky, black birds emerge, flying to the left into the day. In a vertical movement, at the point where the birds meet, they gradually transform into the fields that make up the landscape. As the basis for this metamorphosis, Escher used a tessellation. This is a motif whose outer lines connect seamlessly on all sides and can be repeated endlessly. Escher calls tessellation “the richest source of inspiration” he has ever tapped into.

This print is an example of the new direction Escher took in his prints in the mid-1930s. The themes of eternity and infinity started playing a major role. Day and Night eventually became one of Escher’s most popular prints. He printed over 600 of these during his lifetime.

Hand with Reflecting Sphere is not just a self-portrait. In this lithograph, Escher is combining two realities: one from direct observation and one in the mirror. The print shows Escher’s right hand, which is holding a mirrored sphere (reversed by the litho print so that it looks like a left hand). Thanks to the reflection in this sphere, the artist can see himself and the room around him. This was Escher’s studio at 122 Via Alessandro Poerio in Rome. The convex reflection distorts the room: what is close up appears extra large, and what is farther away actually becomes smaller. Escher is seated in the centre, looking straight at us.

Escher often made self-portraits with the aid of a spherical mirror. This enabled him to study himself and the world around him in detail. In his characteristic fashion, these prints by Escher are showing us unexpected aspects of reality.

In 1969, at the age of 71, Escher completed his last work: Snakes. In this woodcut, three snakes wind their way through a network of large and small circles. Even at this advanced age, Escher was able to carve the most minute details into the wood with a steady hand. For Snakes, he used three blocks of wood, one for each colour. By printing each block three times, revolving around a central point, Escher created a continuous circle. This perfect mastery of technique, the symmetry of the print, and the realistic details all successfully combine to make Snakes a magnificent finale to his oeuvre.

In Escher’s world, a wall may very well also be a floor. One of the best illustrations of this Escher phenomenon can be seen in Relativity. Here he brings together three worlds, each with its own gravity field. What is at the bottom can be seen as the top from another perspective, and horizontal can suddenly become vertical. This wondrous space is populated by various human figures. They use the same stairs, but some are walking up them while others are descending. Their position in space is always relative. In the perspective of their own world, everything is correct, but they cannot place themselves in the perspective of the others; they would fall. They literally and figuratively live separately alongside each other.

Escher made both a lithograph and a woodcut of this print. The work is one of a series of prints in which he has combined various perspectives and viewpoints in one single image.

In Convex and Concave, daily life unfolds in a Mediterranean town. In the left-hand section, we look down on that life from above, from a bird’s eye view. The right-hand section, on the other hand, lets us look at it from below. As in Belvedere, the two halves of the print can exist independently (although it remains a strange construction), but by combining them, Escher has created an impossible space. In the centre, the two perspectives converge, turning the world inside out, as it were. Everything can be questioned: what is inside and what is outside? What is convex and what is concave?

From 1937 onwards, Escher’s prints became increasingly influenced by science, such as mathematics and physics. This enabled Escher to quietly combine different perspectives to form impossible worlds, as in Convex and Concave.

The Castrovalva (Abruzzi) print shows you the landscape through the eyes of a hiker. This hiker was M.C. Escher, who travelled through Italy many times during his life. Castrovalva is a hamlet in the Abruzzi that overlooks the nature reserve of the Gorges de la Sagittario. Escher’s visual walk begins in the foreground, in the left-hand corner, where he draws plants and crawling insects in detail. Beyond a narrow road which clings to a vertiginously steep mountain cliff, an impressive cloudscape looms over the mountain peaks in the distance. In the valley, we see two villages, yet also the plants in the foreground demand the attention of our eye.

Although this 1930 lithograph appears to be very true to nature, Escher uses a number of tricks to intensify the illusion of depth. For example, the steep mountain walls have been exaggerated slightly, and the plants in the foreground are very large. This makes it seem as if everything else is even farther away.

In Other World, a lunar landscape appears through the portals of an open, cube-shaped room. In this print, Escher is playing tricks on our brain. Each side of the small room offers a view that is possible, but by linking the three different perspectives together, he has created an overall picture that is impossible. The dizzying feeling the construction gives, is reinforced by the presence of a simurgh, which you get to view from all angles. Escher was given a statuette of this fabulous Persian creature for his wedding in 1924, and he let it feature in his prints several times.

In Encounter, two completely different people meet. Both of them break free from a tessellation in the background, in which they keep each other prisoner. They walk onto the stage, which contains a circular hole. The pessimist, with his finger raised in warning, walks to the right. The cheerful optimist, with his hand outstretched, walks to the left. They circle back and meet in the middle, where they shake hands despite their differences.

There was already ample evidence of Escher’s love of surprising and dizzying perspectives in his early prints. Tower of Babel tells the well-known biblical story of humankind’s attempt to build a tower to heaven. God put a stop to this by having everyone speak different languages. This is called the Babylonian confusion of tongues. The subject was very popular in art history, yet Escher managed to give it his own twist. By taking an extreme bird’s eye view as his vantage point, he emphasises the staggering height of the tower. At the top of the building, the dramatic climax takes place: the people stop building, confused, because they can no longer understand each other.

In Print Gallery, a number of works from Escher’s oeuvre are exhibited in a gallery. On the left, an attentive visitor is looking at the Senglea, Malta print. But it doesn’t stop at just looking: the visitor is also depicted in the print. He is looking, but at the same time he is being looked at. Escher uses a swirling motion to make the buildings flow over, so that the roofs of the city also cover the gallery. In this way, the print gallery and the print of the Maltese town are incorporated in one single world.

Print Gallery is a good example of Escher’s intuition for mathematics. Although he possessed little theoretical knowledge of the subject, he was nevertheless able to depict many mathematical concepts perfectly. For instance, here he is showing a so-called Riemann surface, a mathematical figure that visualises infinity. He did this, however, unconsciously and the mathematical aspect was pointed out to him later, by two professors. He arrived at his form while puzzling it out himself. He got very far, but at the end he had not filled in the central area of the print. The print, and in particular the centre, has been studied by mathematicians for a long time. In 2002, a team of scientists from Leiden and California succeeded in completing the centre.

In Reptiles, Escher brings one of his tessellations to life. In an open drawing notebook, we see the tessellation consisting of reptilian figures. One of these creatures manages to escape from the flat, two-dimensional world of the drawing. It climbs onto a pile of books and then clambers over various objects before returning to the notebook. Once it has arrived, the three-dimensional creature crawls back into the drawing, giving up its spatial aspect and becoming flat again.

Escher often transforms his tessellations into visual stories. In prints such as Day and Night, Encounter and Metamorphosis I, II and III, he transforms flat, mathematical shapes into recognisable creatures.

Escher’s mastery of lithography is clearly visible in Three Spheres II. He convincingly reproduces the different materials of the three spheres with this printmaking technique. He also reproduces the reflections in each sphere with great precision. The transparent sphere on the left is partly filled with water, which reflects part of the surroundings. The sphere on the right is matte and only casts shadows. The central sphere reflects its entire surroundings. In its reflection the artist himself can be seen, working on the print.

The great strength of Escher is his ability to translate mathematical concepts and sometimes fairly abstract ideas into exciting visual forms. In Waterfall, he begins with an impossible triad, a shape that may exist on paper but not in reality. He hides three of these forms in a recognisable construction, a combination of an aqueduct and a watermill. That is why it is not immediately apparent that the water is flowing uphill here.

In the background, a hilly Italian landscape can be seen, and Escher has also drawn a so-called ‘bread roll dome’, a rounded roof typical of the Italian Amalfi coast. The striking plants on the left are an enlargement of mosses that Escher saw in the woods near his Dutch home in Baarn. By blending possibility and impossibility, realism and fantasy, and reality and unreality, Escher creates a print that you will never forget.

Escher created his woodcut Metamorphosis I, the first one of what eventually became a series of three, in 1937. All three prints feature Atrani, a small town on the Amalfi Coast where he visited on several occasions. Metamorphosis II followed in the winter of 1939-1940. Whereas I still has a beginning and an end, II and III form a cycle.

Out of the word metamorphosis, Escher created a series of changing shapes, in which he made use of regular tessellations. The well-known forms that often recur in his work are all featured in this print: reptiles, fish, insects and birds. Through free and playful association, Escher transforms the city into a chessboard, which in turn changes into the letters of the original word. Metamorphosis III followed in the winter of 1967-1968, an extended version of II.

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.

In the Drawing Hands lithograph, two detailed, lifelike hands detach themselves from the paper. With carefully considered lines, they are sketching each other’s sleeves, which remain bound within the confines of the paper. The left-handed Escher uses his right hand here as a model. Whereas the hands are rendered as three-dimensional, the sleeves remain flat. This creates the startling illusion that the hands are actually drawing each other.