On Sunday afternoon, I went down to the ArtScience Museum, which has to be one of the coolest looking buildings in Singapore.  It’s the white one with the huge cantilevered sections:

The building looks like a flower to me, so it seems appropriate that the rainwater collection system at its base is filled with water lilies.

The ArtScience Museum appears mostly to host rotating exhibitions, and I went specifically to see: “Journey to Infinity: Escher’s World of Wonder.”  Wow.  We all know that M.C. Escher was a genius, because prints of his woodcuts and lithographs appear on everything from coffee cups to umbrellas, but it’s all the more amazing when it’s gathered in one place.  I learned that Escher worked in design and architectural art in the Netherlands before he began exploring more mathematical pieces.

And then he began to develop his tessellations, which make you drop your jaw as you scratch your head and think, “how did he come up with this stuff?”

These fish are more basic — they’re part of a study series he did — but I love their expressions:

And then he started expanding his work with tessellations into broader concepts, like light and dark and landscapes…

… and tessellations coming to life.

He was interested in spheres and mirrors and distortions and reflections:

And then, of course, he became interested in impossible staircases:

I was especially excited to see these two prints hanging nearly side by side in the exhibit because these drawings were on the backs of a playing card set that the Bridge Ladies used to use (I miss you, Bridge Ladies!):

This was Escher’s final lithograph (and a reminder of my snake encounter in the woods earlier that morning); it’s an exploration of infinity:

Escher was Dutch, by the way.  Just thought I’d throw that in there as a nod to my heritage.

The one question I had leaving the exhibit was, “where did they get all of these prints?”  Usually exhibitions pull works from museums and private collections all over the place. For this exhibition, however, almost all of the labels said, “From The Liberty Collection, U.S.A.”  But if you Google “Liberty Collection,” nothing in the art world comes up (though you do learn that the Liberty Collection is “a wirecut commercial brick with formal edges and a monolithic look”).  So I’m left wondering where all of these prints and objects live when they’re not visiting Singapore.