Bruce Silverstein Gallery presents
Between Order and Chaos: André Kertész and M. C. Escher, an exhibition that stages a compelling dialogue between two visionaries who transformed how reality is perceived. Though working in different media—photography and printmaking—
Kertész and Escher each pursued a deeply personal investigation into structure, illusion, and the fragile balance between logic and disruption. Seen together, their works reveal how order and chaos are not opposing forces, but intertwined conditions through which the world becomes visible and meaningful.
Both artists came of age during periods of profound social and geographic upheaval, experiences that shaped their independent ways of seeing. Kertész’s migrations across Europe and the United States fostered a poetic sensitivity to fleeting moments and subtle visual anomalies, while Escher’s travels through Italy and Spain sharpened his fascination with geometry, repetition, and spatial paradox. Each cultivated the perspective of an observer slightly removed from the center, attentive to patterns others overlooked and receptive to instability as a source of insight rather than confusion.
Escher’s meticulously constructed prints transform natural phenomena and architectural forms into systems of mesmerizing complexity. Ripples, reflections, and recursive spaces become vehicles for visual logic pushed to its breaking point, where certainty dissolves into wonder. His images make visible the hidden structures underlying perception, while simultaneously undermining their reliability. Order appears precise and mathematical, yet always on the verge of collapse into contradiction and impossibility.
Kertész achieves a parallel tension through the camera, extracting moments of visual dissonance from everyday life. Through reflection, distortion, and unexpected framing, familiar scenes subtly unravel. Puddles, windows, and bodies become sites where reality bends, revealing poetry within constraint. Unlike Escher’s invented worlds, Kertész’s images remain anchored in lived experience, their quiet disruptions unfolding within ordinary surroundings.
Together,
Between Order and Chaos invites viewers to reconsider the act of seeing itself. By juxtaposing these two practices, the exhibition reveals how perception is shaped as much by uncertainty as by structure. In the space between precision and instability, Kertész and Escher offer a shared reminder that reality is not fixed, but continually reorganized through the act of looking.
Image:
André Kertész (1894-1985)
December 15, 1979
SX-70 Polaroid
4 1/4 x 3 1/2 in (10.8 x 8.9 cm) © André Kertész