Print Gallery (Dutch: Prentententoonstelling) is a lithograph printed in 1956 by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher. It depicts a man in a gallery viewing a print of a seaport, and among the buildings in the seaport is the very gallery in which he is standing, making use of the Droste effect with visual recursion.[1] The lithograph has attracted discussion in both mathematical and artistic contexts. Escher considered Print Gallery to be among the best of his works.[2]
Bruno Ernst cites M. C. Escher as stating that he began Print Gallery "from the idea that it must be possible to make an annular bulge, a cyclic expansion ... without beginning or end."[3] Escher attempted to do this with straight lines, but intuitively switched to using curved lines which make the grid expand greatly as it rotates.[3][4]
In his book Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter explains the seeming paradox embodied in Print Gallery as a strange loop showing three kinds of "in-ness": the gallery is physically in the town ("inclusion"); the town is artistically in the picture ("depiction"); the picture is mentally in the person ("representation").[5]
Escher's signature is on a circular void in the center of the work. In 2003, two Dutch mathematicians, Bart de Smit and Hendrik Lenstra, reported a way of filling in the void by treating the work as drawn on an elliptic curve over the field of complex numbers. They deem an idealized version of Print Gallerytocontain a copy of itself (the Droste effect), rotated clockwise by about 157.63 degrees and shrunk by a factor of about 22.58.[4] Their website further explores the mathematical structure of the picture.[6]
Print Gallery has been discussed in relation to post-modernism by a number of writers, including Silvio Gaggi,[7] Barbara Freedman,[8] Stephen Bretzius,[9] and Marie-Laure Ryan.[10]
