The wonderful world of Escher is one of impossible constructions, infinite avenues of exploration, mirror effects, and tessellated motifs and patterns. More than any other artist, Escher succeeded in transforming visual ambiguity into ambiguity of meaning, seducing and enchanting the viewer with drawings and lithographs that, over the years, have become part of our collective imagination and have been used in many different ways – as covers of famous LPs, gift boxes, stamps, greetings cards and tiles. Escher is everywhere.

The Maurits Cornelis Escher retrospective, open from 12 March to 19 July 2015 in Bologna, has been enhanced and set out in a brand new way, focusing on aspects that have never been looked at before. It features over one hundred and fifty works by the famous Dutch artist.

The works on display include Escherʼs most famous masterpieces such as Hand with Reflecting Sphere, Day and Night, Möbius Strip II, Relativity, Another World II, Bond of Union, and the Emblemata series. The exhibition includes the brand new Eschermania section, which explores the artistʼs extensive and widespread influence.

The exhibition narrative is divided into six sections:
• Training: Escher, Italy and Art Nouveau inspiration
• Reflective and metamorphic surfaces
• Metamorphoses
• From the Alhambra to tessellation
• Geometric paradoxes: from sheet to space
• Escherian economy and Eschermania

Eschermania takes an in-depth look at Escherʼs past and present influence on publishing, graphics and objects, not to mention advertising, fashion, comic books and the cinema. The extraordinary images, invented well before computers came onto the market, are in no way inferior to those created today using the most sophisticated digital techniques. The greatness of an artist can also be measured by his capacity to influence other artists and society as a whole. Despite not having any pupils of his own, Escher certainly met these two criteria. The beat generation soon fell in love with Escherʼs creations. This led to his art being “stolen”, particularly in America, where it was printed on T-shirts and posters produced in the psychedelic colours so fashionable at the time. Escher was very angry about this and went on to found the Escher Foundation, which still protects his rights today. The artist was not always happy about his engravings being used for LP covers by some of the biggest pop bands of the time. There is a famous account of how Mick Jagger was denied permission to feature Verbum on the cover of the latest Rolling Stones LP Let it Bleed, released in 1969. All this can be defined as “Eschermania”, which is the subject of a section in the exhibition that tells how, even more so today, people from all walks of life – from the merely curious to mathematicians, from eccentrics to rule-breakers, and even artists who, despite not having known him, draw inspiration from him for their works – are profoundly fascinated by the kaleidoscopic world of Escher. In fact, a large number of imitators have somehow “learned” the “Escher method” and produced a series of variations on the theme. They include David Hop, the American publicist and graphic designer, the Frenchman Dominique Ribault, who has recently also used tessellation in his three-dimensional sculptures, and the German Hans Kuiper, who used computerized techniques to reproduce works by famous 20th-century artists, starting with Escher.