‘Drawing Hands’ and the illusion-inducing ‘Ascending and Descending’. These two works, which you have likely seen at least once, are both by the Dutch printmaker Maurits Cornelis Escher. While the ...

In the 1960s, the mathematically inspired images of Dutch artist M.C. Escher became a feature of popular culture. I remember album covers, T-shirts, posters and jigsaw puzzles emblazoned with the ...

For people like herself, says Anneke Bart, math is like a puzzle. “We sit around and play with pictures and dink around,” says the professor of mathematics. That’s how, faced with a tough question, ...

When we spoke with Nasher Museum of Art director Sarah Schroth for the museum’s 10th anniversary, she noted that, while she loves contemporary art, it doesn’t speak to everyone. That’s one reason she ...

On the printed page of an art book or magazine, Escher’s work acquires a hard, mechanical coldness that exaggerates certain tendencies in his work, principally his overpowering search for visual order ...

M.C. Escher is well known for his surreal, reality-warping engravings -- two hands drawing each other, infinite staircases, fish changing into birds and back again. Never an art-world celebrity, he ...

M.C. Escher is the Ginger Rogers of the art world. Just like Rogers pulled off the same fabulous footwork as her acclaimed dance partner, Fred Astaire, but backwards and in heels, Escher created some ...

The Escher Loop optical illusion creates a staircase that appears endlessly climbable yet never reaches a higher point. Using ...

THE universe may have the same surreal geometry as some of art’s most mind-boggling images. That’s the upshot of a study by the world’s most famous living scientist, Stephen Hawking of the University ...