SASHA GRISHIN AM FAHA
  • Home
  • Academic
    • Academic profile
    • Teaching and outreach
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Articles and essays
    • Art criticism and polemics
    • Online publications
    • Catalogue essays
    • Lectures and conference papers
    • Canberra Times
  • Media
    • Video
    • Podcasts
    • Media Comment and Reviews
  • Curatorship
    • Curatorial
    • Exhibitions opened
    • Exhibitions judged
  • Blog
  • Grishin's Bookshelf
  • News
  • Contact

Grishin's Art Blog (GAB)

Picture

GAB 36 (Grishin’s Art Blog number 36)

27/12/2018

1 Comment

 

Curious world of Escher

Picture
Escher x nendo | Between Two Worlds at NGV International Photo: Sasha Grishin
 
It was Marcel Duchamp who famously declared – “there is no solution because there is no problem”.  Much of modernism in art is not about problem solving, but grappling with formalist problems of picture making.
 
In this, the Dutch 20th century printmaker, MC Etcher, has gone against the grain and spent much of his life making bewilderingly complex images that at their core contain a problem, which demands from the viewer a solution. 
 

Picture
M. C. Escher, Day and night February 1938, woodcut, printed in grey and black inks Escher Collection, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands © The M. C. Escher Company, the Netherlands. All rights reserved
 
MC Escher (1898-1972) is an artist whose name is synonymous with mathematically challenging, optically intriguing and intellectually perplexing prints.  He created a world of impossible objects, endless staircases and radical visual transformations that challenge our grasp of reality and our understanding of the shape of time.  Escher’s woodcuts, lithographs and engravings, at least in reproduction, have become iconic, where the image is known better than the artist’s name.
 
In his lifetime, Escher had to wait until he was in his fifties to receive widespread popularity and only at the age of seventy did he achieve his first retrospective exhibition.  Escher, with his intricate tessellations, complex geometric structures and mathematical riddles, steered a course in his art that seemed a long way from the popular trends and styles in twentieth century modernism and attracted the support of fellow intellectual travellers rather than mainstream art critics and art historians. 
 
In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in the work of Escher with a hugely successful exhibition of his art held in Rio de Janeiro in 2011. A major touring exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh in 2015 toured to London and throughout Italy, attracting huge crowds in each venue.  The time for Escher has arrived.
 
Picture
Installation view of Escher x nendo | Between Two Worlds exhibition space space at NGV International Photo: Sean Fennessy
 
The last major Escher show I saw was the substantial centennial tribute exhibition that I caught in San Diego, two decades ago. Curated by Ruth Fine from the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, it thematically presented the development of the artist’s vision in a fairly didactic manner.
 
In the previous history of exhibiting Escher, there is nothing to prepare us for the shock to the senses in the National Gallery of Victoria show.  Borrowing about 160 Escher prints and drawings from the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, the NGV engaged the nendo design studio in Tokyo and its Chief Designer and Founder, Oki Sato, not to design an exhibition around Escher, but to enter into a collaborative dialogue with the artist. 
 
Picture
Installation view of Escher x nendo | Between Two Worlds exhibition space space at NGV International Photo: Sasha Grishin
 
A hallmark of a great exhibition, one that revisits a repertoire of world-famous art, is that it allows us to find a new perspective on what we thought we already knew.  In this exhibition, we see Escher afresh – not through the eyes of twentieth century empiricism, but through those of twenty-first century digitally liberated design.  One of the main challenges that Escher set himself was to replicate three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface. His intention was not to completely embrace illusionism and treat the piece of paper like a frame for a window into the world, but to continuously explore the tension between these dimensions. nendo works in reverse.  The studio operates in three-dimensional real and digital worlds but wishes to replicate two-dimensional effects. 
 
Picture
Installation view of Escher x nendo | Between Two Worlds exhibition space space at NGV International Photo: Sean Fennessy
 
Throughout the exhibition, there are numerous visual ambushes that subvert our grasp on reality as we are invited to enter an exciting labyrinth of visual ambiguities.  Oki Sato’s ‘icon image’ for Escher is a little schematic house design through which the fantastic world of Escher is engaged.  This design is replicated in many completely unexpected ways, such as a giant ‘chandelier’ made up of tens of thousands of these tiny houses that becomes a kinetic fabric of vision and a metaphor for the distorting mirror created by Escher.  In another exhibition space, the viewer encounters a house-shaped tunnel, or an illusionistic space made up of these house designs of ever-diminishing sizes, allowing you to be initially physically, and then visually, drawn into an impossible space.  This acts as a metaphor for the optical illusions so close to the heart of Escher.
 
The most impressive of the nendo interventions and one of the most impressive installation designs attempted in any Australian gallery, is a huge space accessible from a specially constructed elevated platform where scores of these simplified houses have been fabricated leading from positive to negative spaces.  It is within this installed, completely immersive environment, consisting of improbable constructions, that we encounter some of the classic pieces of Escher. 
 
Picture
Snake room installation view at Escher x nendo | Between Two Worlds exhibition space space at NGV International Photo: Sasha Grishin
 
These immersive environments seduce and intrigue the viewer, constantly leading them into the fantastic imagination of Escher.  This is less an exhibition of the prints of Escher than a physical encounter with the world of Escher and the experience of his improbable inventions.
 
The exhibition does include most of the classic works by Escher, such as the Drawing hands lithograph (1948), where each hand appears to be drawing the other; the perfectly observed Eye mezzotint (1946) and his most famous images – the Day and Night woodcut (1938) and the Ascending and Descending lithograph (1960).  A rare treat is his bewilderingly complex late woodcut Snakes (1969) – an exploration of interlinking shapes of infinity – now shown within the ‘snake house’, a serpentine, waist-high installed room replicating and reinterpreting Escher’s snake design. 
 
Picture
M. C. Escher, Hand with reflecting sphere (Self-portrait in spherical mirror) January 1935, lithograph, Escher Collection, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands © The M. C. Escher Company, the Netherlands. All rights reserved
 
This exhibition is not so much a presentation of the work of Escher, but an interpretation of his art from a very contemporary perspective.  It will surprise, delight and challenge the viewer and suggests that, perhaps, this cerebral sombre Dutchman had a dry sense of humour that he hoped would be discovered in posterity. 
 

Picture
M. C. Escher, Cycle May 1938, lithograph, Escher Collection, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands © The M. C. Escher Company, the Netherlands. All rights reserved
1 Comment

    GRISHIN'S ART BLOG

    Sasha  Grishin  AM, FAHA is the author of more than 25 books on art, including Australian Art: A History, and has served as the art critic for The Canberra Times for forty years. He is an Emeritus Professor  at the Australian National University, Canberra; Guest Curator at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Honorary Principal Fellow, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne.

    Archives

    December 2022
    August 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    December 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    February 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

    Keep up-to-date with Sasha Grishin's blog with the RSS feed.
    RSS offers ease of access and ensures your privacy, as you do not need to subscribe with an email address.
    Click here to download a free feed reader

Proudly powered by Weebly
  • Home
  • Academic
    • Academic profile
    • Teaching and outreach
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Articles and essays
    • Art criticism and polemics
    • Online publications
    • Catalogue essays
    • Lectures and conference papers
    • Canberra Times
  • Media
    • Video
    • Podcasts
    • Media Comment and Reviews
  • Curatorship
    • Curatorial
    • Exhibitions opened
    • Exhibitions judged
  • Blog
  • Grishin's Bookshelf
  • News
  • Contact