Last exhibited at the BYU Museum of Art in Provo, Utah, this lithograph by the Dutch Artist MC Escher is a mind bending masterpiece of the Surreal Art Movement. A monochromatic work with all the dynamic hallmarks of Escher’s adventurous style, it manipulates space, light, perspective & real-world physics simultaneously to craft an impossible 3-dimensional world within a flat 2-dimensional image. Taking combined inspiration from the Penrose Triangle & Stairs, Escher heightens the inherent visual complications of these shapes by throwing gravity into the mix, taking a pervasive force of nature and re-applying it thrice over in the same space, with each gravitational plane perpendicular to each other. The result is a striking, labyrinthine optical illusion where 16 faceless figures go about living their ordinary lives, obliviously doing so in the most extraordinary way imaginable. Escher’s frequent use of stairs in his work was not just a visual motif, but as his writings suggest, also a charged societal statement — a visual depiction of humanity’s never-ending hierarchical rat race and its bleak cyclical redundancy.

“That staircase is a rather sad, pessimistic subject, as well as being very profound and absurd….Yes, yes, we climb up and up, we imagine we are ascending; every step is about 10 inches high, terribly tiring – and where does it all get us? Nowhere.”  - MC Escher