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M.C. Escher's "Drawing Hands"

February 15, 2018
M.C. Escher, “Drawing Hands

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!

Image: M.C. Escher, Drawing Hands. Copyright 2017 The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands. All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com

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