Blog

Guest Post by Megan Mayfield, MOA Marketing Intern

Guest Post by Megan Mayfield, MOA Marketing Intern

One of Escher's best-known images, this lithograph of two hands drawing each other presents several of the artist's favorite concepts. Most notably, it is an example of what author Douglas Hofstadter has called a 'strange loop,' a paradoxical system which continuously self-referentially repeats with no seeming beginning or end. Escher was fascinated by such paradoxical recursions, whether he explored them in the form of staircases, waterfalls, or self-illustrating hands. This is also one of Escher's clearest explorations of the illusionism implicit in representational art, as the line between two-dimensional drawing and three-dimensional reality are cleverly at play. See this artwork and many more at M.C. Escher: Other Worlds, now open at the BYU Museum of Art!

Guest Post by Isabelle Kramer, MOA Marketing Student Employee

Guest Post by MOA Marketing Intern, Megan Mayfield

This week at the BYU Museum of Art, a selection of prints by Albrecht Dürer are on display in the Print Study Room, from 10 AM - 4 PM, Monday - Friday. Today we explore one of these prints on display. Although this scene of Christ taking leave of his mother took place in first century Palestine, Dürer has taken the liberty of dressing Mary's attendants in contemporary fashionable headdresses. Additionally, a Germanic castle complex occupies the background. Such anachronisms were an intentional move on the part of many Northern Renaissance artists to help viewers connect with these narratives and make them feel familiar to the viewers. Artists of the Renaissance sought to fool the eye by making a two-dimensional surface appear as a window on the three-dimensional world. They strove to portray real anatomy, real clothing, and place them in real settings, moving away from the other-worldly scenes of the centuries before. The Northern countries were particularly known for the production of textiles, which may explain the overabundance of drapery in Mary's dress and Christ's robes.

A new exhibition is opening on February 2, 2018 at the BYU Museum of Art. The exhibition is

Guest post by Megan Mayfield, MOA Marketing Intern

2018

March 3 – August 11, 2018

May 18 – September 29, 2018

The current exhibition, M.C. Escher: Other Worlds, explores pieces both new and familiar by Dutch artist M.C. Escher. The beautiful print La Cathédrale Engloutie is perhaps one of these unknown pieces, but its backstory has ties to French composer Claude Debussy.

Michael Soelberg's A Blessed Curse is a painting currently on display in the exhibition The Interpretation Thereof: Contemporary LDS Art and Scripture. The title references the paradox of Adam and Eve's mortal sojourn, wherein their decision to enter a fallen world was a catalyst for the greatest of sorrows and trials, as well as the realization of joyous eternal blessings. Man and Woman—figures representing all of us—stand with gazes fixed unflinchingly forward, though in different directions. They stand as two parts of a whole, together seeing greater perspective. The green tones of the square, perhaps symbolic of their one-Edenic state, is echoes in their flesh—a reminder of humankind's inherent divinity as literal children of God. The vibrant red highlights and droplets of blood signify their now-fallen state. The four clocks measure the passage of earthly time, contrasting with the ladder reaching toward eternal realms above.

Lee Greene Richards (1878-1950), New Years Eve 1862 - Old Salt Lake Theater, 1926, oil on canvas, 52 x 100 1/4 inches. Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 1938.