Few artists make you question your own eyes even as you look. Walking into M.C. Escher: The Exhibition at the Somerset House, that feeling sets in almost from the first step.
Installation view. M.C.Escher : The Exhibition. Somerset House 2026. Photo:Stephen Chung
A Building Made for Escher
Somerset House may be the most fitting space in London to host an Escher exhibition.
Stairs greet you from the moment you enter the galleries. Throughout the visit they keep rising and descending, carrying you between floors, and it is hard not to think of Escher’s famous “impossible architecture” — as though, at any moment, the figures from “Ascending and Descending” might come walking toward you from the far end of a staircase.
The entrance and exit answer one another with quiet wit. The ticket desk and the shop sit at opposite ends of the route and look strikingly alike, a visual design that leaves you with a sense of circling back. As you leave, a subtle illusion takes hold: you seem to have gone all the way around, only to arrive again at the start.
This sense of beginning and end folding into each other calls to mind the Möbius strip — that infinite loop with a single surface and a single edge. For Escher, after all, repetition, recurrence and endless extension were among his most enduring obsessions.
The domed space on the upper floor offers another kind of echo. Its semicircular structure and shifting light recall Escher’s preoccupation with the order of space. Here, the architecture itself seems to become part of the exhibition.
Installation view. M.C.Escher : The Exhibition. Somerset House 2026. Photo:Stephen Chung
A Man Forever in Search of Order
Most people remember Escher for the vertiginous visual paradoxes. But perhaps the exhibition’s greatest value lies in showing us how those works came to be, step by step.
As a young man, Escher studied architecture but failed to complete his degree, his grades falling short; he then moved into the decorative arts. In hindsight, that detour shaped nearly everything that followed.
His early landscapes — trees, mountains, rivers — reveal an appetite for observing the world. His long travels through Italy and Spain then turned his attention to architectural structure, spatial relationships and geometric order. The mosaic decoration of the Alhambra in Granada, above all, proved almost decisive: those infinitely extending, interlocking patterns showed him that an image could possess a logic as rigorous as mathematics.
And so landscape gradually gave way to structure. The real world gave way to imagined space.
Mathematics, though never his field, became one of his most vital sources of inspiration. The infinite loops, impossible architectures and spatial paradoxes for which he is now known were born precisely in that ongoing collision between art and mathematics.
M.C. Escher Drawing Hands, 1948 Lithograph, 282×332 mm M.C. Escher Heritage Collection, The Netherlands All M.C. Escher works © 2026 The M.C. Escher Heritage, Baarn, The Netherlands All rights reserved www.mcescher.com
A Public Lecture on Illusion
The most pleasant surprise of this exhibition is that it refuses to simply display the work. It sets out to explain why the work holds together at all.
The moment a question about a particular printmaking technique surfaces in your mind, the next panel offers a detailed account of woodcut, lithography and other processes. Tools, materials, methods and film footage together form a complete path of learning.
The videos are especially well-designed. A large projected piece at the entrance pulls you swiftly into Escher’s world, while another animation patiently takes apart how an image flips, loops and locks into place to produce those seemingly impossible effects. Compared with static display, this kind of moving explanation does far more to convey how Escher thought.
The exhibition also stages a number of physical models of optical illusion: spatial experiments in concave and convex, the celebrated Penrose triangle, and assorted paradox devices that let visitors feel, first-hand, how an illusion takes shape.
Drawing has always been, in a sense, a kind of deception. Escher simply pushed that deception to its limit.
Installation view. M.C.Escher : The Exhibition. Somerset House 2026. Photo:Stephen Chung
When the Viewer Steps into the Picture
If part of this exhibition is about “learning” Escher, another part is about “becoming” him.
There are plenty of interactive stations, their labels reading “Now it’s your turn!” — and they truly make you feel you might.
The Relativity Room, built on the principles of perspective, tilts its floor and ceiling and uses a specially proportioned grid to fool the brain, making two people standing on either side appear wildly different in height. In Escher’s original “Hand with Reflecting Sphere“, the artist studies himself and the entire room through a mirrored orb; in the interactive version, you become the figure within the sphere, standing in the artist’s place to look at yourself anew. In the Droste effect station, an image within an image repeats without end, an infinitely recursive loop in which you are at once the viewer and part of the picture.
These interactions are not merely for photographs. They let visitors grasp the core of Escher’s project — that we believe we are observing the world, when much of the time we are seeing only the brain’s interpretation of it.
By the time you leave, you may already have forgotten the title of any particular work. But you will surely remember the feeling: that the moment your eyes begin to doubt themselves, the world suddenly becomes more interesting than reality itself.
很少有藝術家的作品，能讓人一邊觀看，一邊不斷懷疑自己的眼睛。
走進薩默賽特宮（ Somerset House ）的埃舍爾（ M.C.Escher ）展覽，這種感覺幾乎從第一步就開始了。
一座屬於埃舍爾的建築
薩默賽特宮或許是倫敦最適合舉辦埃舍爾展覽的空間。
從進入展廳開始，就能看到樓梯。而觀展過程中，樓梯不斷向上、向下延伸，觀眾在不同樓層之間穿梭，很容易聯想到埃捨爾 那些著名的「不可能的建築」。彷彿下一秒，就會看見《上升與下降（Ascending and Descending）》中的人物從樓梯另一端走來。
展覽的入口與出口也形成了很巧妙的呼應。售票處與商店位於動線的兩端，看起來十分相似，這種視覺設計讓人產生一種循環往復的感覺。離開展覽時，會產生一種微妙的錯覺：好像自己繞了一圈，又回到了起點。
這種首尾相連的體驗，不禁讓人想到莫比烏斯環——那條只有一個面與一條邊的無限循環曲線。對於埃舍爾而言，循環、重復與無盡延伸，本就是他最著迷的主題之一。
而二樓的穹頂空間又帶來了另一種呼應。半圓形結構與不斷變化的光線，讓人聯想到埃舍爾作品中對於空間秩序的探索。在這裡，建築本身彷彿也成為了展覽的一部分。
M.C.Escher : The Exhibition. Somerset House 2026. Photo:Stephen Chung
一個不斷尋找秩序的人
很多人記住埃舍爾，是因為那些讓人頭暈目眩的視覺悖論。
但展覽最有價值的地方，或許在於它讓觀眾看到這些作品是如何一步步形成的。
年輕時的埃舍爾曾學習建築，卻因為成績不理想而未能完成學業。後來轉入裝飾藝術專業。回過頭來看，這段經歷幾乎影響了他之後的整個創作生涯。
早期作品中的自然風景、樹木與山川，展現出他對於觀察世界的興趣。而隨後在意大利與西班牙的長期旅行，則讓他開始關注建築結構、空間關係與幾何秩序。
尤其是西班牙阿爾罕布拉宮的馬賽克裝飾，對他的影響幾乎是決定性的。那些能夠無限延展、彼此嵌合的圖案，讓他意識到圖像可以像數學一樣擁有嚴謹的邏輯。於是，風景逐漸讓位於結構。現實世界開始讓位於想象中的空間。
數學雖然從來不是埃舍爾的專業領域，卻成為了他最重要的靈感來源之一。那些後來廣為人知的無限循環、不可能建築與空間悖論，正是在藝術與數學不斷碰撞的過程中誕生的。
關於錯覺的一堂公開課
這場展覽最令人驚喜的部分，是它並不滿足於展示作品本身。
它試圖解釋這些作品為何能夠成立。
觀展時，剛剛對某種版畫技法產生疑問，下一秒便出現了關於木版畫、石版畫與其他版畫工藝的詳細介紹。工具、材料、製作過程以及影像資料共同構成了一條完整的學習路徑。
展覽中的視頻尤其出色。入口處的大型影像作品迅速將觀眾帶入埃舍爾的世界；而另一組動畫則詳細拆解了畫面如何翻轉、循環與銜接，最終形成那些看似不可能的視覺效果。相比靜態展示，這種動態解釋更能幫助觀眾理解埃舍爾的思考方式。
同時，展覽還設置了多個關於視覺錯覺的實體模型。凹面與凸面（concave and convex）的空間實驗、著名的彭羅斯三角（ Penrose Triangle），以及各種視覺悖論裝置，都讓觀眾能夠親身體驗錯覺是如何產生的。
繪畫某種程度上本來就是一種「欺騙」。只是埃捨爾將這種欺騙發揮到了極致。
Installation views of M.C.Escher exhibition at Somerset House, London, UK
當觀眾走進畫里
如果說展覽的一部分是在學習埃舍爾，那麼另一部分則是在成為埃舍爾。
展覽中有不少觀眾可以參與的互動環節，展簽上寫著「輪到你啦！（Now it’s your turn！）」確實讓人覺得自己可以成為埃舍爾。
透視錯覺屋（Relativity Room）基於透視學原理，地板和天花板呈傾斜設計，配合特殊比例的網格圖案，利用欺騙人腦的視覺錯覺，讓站在房間左右兩側的兩個人產生巨大的身高差對比。
在埃舍爾的原作《舉著反光球的手（Hand with Reflecting Sphere）》里，藝術家透過鏡面球體觀察自己與整個房間。而在互動，觀眾也能夠成為球體中的人物，站在藝術家的位置重新觀看自己。
在德羅斯特效應（Droste Effect）的互動中，畫面中的畫面不斷重復，形成無限遞歸的循環結構。觀眾既是觀看者，也是畫面的一部分。
這些互動並不只是為了拍照。它們讓觀眾真正理解埃舍爾的創作核心——我們以為自己在觀察世界，但很多時候，我們看到的只是大腦對於世界的解釋。
離開展覽的時候，人們或許已經忘記了某件具體作品的名字。
但一定會記得那種感覺：當眼睛開始懷疑自己時，世界忽然變得比現實更加有趣。
Installation views of M.C.Escher exhibition at Somerset House, London, UK
M.C. Escher. The Exhibition
Somerset House Embankment Galleries
5th June – 6th September 2026
Text by 撰文 x Shoran Jiang 姜嘯然
