Have Your Mind Blown At The National Gallery Of Victoria’s Bonkers New Exhibit

MC Escher was a perspective-challenging, mind-melting lithographic artist, whose trippy artworks fused mathematics and science with the psychedelic. Nendo, by contrast, is a Japanese design studio, whose founder Oki Sato mixes up classy, minimalist styles with something far stranger.

On face value then, the pair are as far from one another as is possible to imagine – creative chalk and cheese.

But the genius of Between Two Worlds, a new exhibit now showing at the National Gallery of Victoria, is in finding a common ground between the two visionaries, producing something totally unique in the process.

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Between Two Worlds boasts more than 100 prints from Escher. Interestingly, the pieces have been selected to give an exhaustive look at the artist’s career, rather than simply focus on the tripped-out images for which he is best known.

To that end, the exhibit contains some of Escher’s earliest work, produced from 1916, including landscapes, brusque self-portraits, and images of his father.

Of course, there’s a lot of mind-melting stuff too: images of never-ending staircases, walkways that move back and forth in space, and infinite Moebius strips covered in giant ants.

Working with Escher’s perspective-pushing style, the folk at Nendo have designed their own flourishes for the museum, all focused around the image of the house.

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Their contributions include ‘Reflection House’, a criss-cross of black and white lines painted onto the gallery walls; ‘Emerging House’, benches and chairs shaped like miniature houses; ‘House In Perspective’, a mess of wire structures and mirrors; ‘Gathered House’, a circular-shaped room filled with glassy tesseracts; and many more.

Needless to say, the combination of Nendo’s reflective, primal work, and Escher’s stranger visual proclivities will prove to be one head-trip of a day out.

But, given Escher’s long reputation as the creator that even people who aren’t into art enjoy, it’ll also be a distinctly accessible event even for people who aren’t usually art-museum people.

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The Between Two Worlds exhibit is open from now till April 7, and adult tickets cost $28. For more information, head over to the NGV website, here.

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(All images: NGV / supplied)