Step Into the Impossible: M.C. Escher arrives at Somerset House

We all know an Escher when we see one. The staircase that climbs forever and gets frustratingly nowhere. The hand drawing the hand that's drawing it. The shoal of fish that turns, tile by tile, into a flock of birds.

His influence can be seen everywhere. On album covers and in comic books. Across that famous endless stairway in Labyrinth. And into games like Monument Valley. So much so, it's likely you've encountered his impossible worlds without knowing who was behind it. Which is fitting, really: for most of his life, the art world overlooked Escher, even in his home country, the Netherlands. He was 70 before he got a proper retrospective. The crowds came later, and they haven't stopped since.

From today, you can meet the originals, step inside some of them and trace the entire journey from the Dutch artist's early Italian landscapes when he was just getting started, through to the tessellations he worked out by hand after a trip to the Alhambra, to the mind-bending paradoxes that made his name.

M.C. Escher. The Exhibition at Somerset House opens at a moment when machines can conjure an image in seconds. Every one of the artworks on display was cut by a human hand, on a woodblock or a copper plate, by one extraordinarily patient person. The wonder was never just how this is possible… It's that somebody actually made it.

The show is organised as a journey through eight chapters of Escher's life, curated by Federico Giudiceandrea, the world's leading authority on the artist's work. It opens with the landscapes and Italian coastlines he sketched in his twenties, back when he was still figuring out his approach.

Then you'll see the turning point when a 1936 trip to the Alhambra in Granada changed everything. It was where he saw the geometric tilework of Moorish craftsmen and he went home inspired, painting over a hundred artworks that he became famous for.

There's an interesting London angle, too. You'd think Escher had a head for maths, given his complicated compositions. He didn't, he insisted. Even still, he attracted the attention of some brilliant mathematical minds. The geometer H.S.M. Coxeter posted him a diagram in 1958 that gave him the maths for infinity, and that led directly to the Circle Limit prints. And then father and son Lionel and Roger Penrose reached out with their little paper on "impossible objects" – this led Escher to create Ascending and Descending and Waterfall, two of the staircase-and-water puzzles that we love so much.

It's not all walls with framed originals, either. Alongside his most famous prints – Hand with Reflecting Sphere, Relativity, Day and Night, Drawing Hands, and many more – the show has illusions you can actually climb inside. For instance, you can stand on a checkerboard floor between two giant reflecting spheres or lose yourself in a mirrored room where his birds multiply into infinity. Or you can take a turn in a forced-perspective chamber that shrinks one person to doll-size while another becomes a giant.

So yes, you'll be able to see Escher's paintings up close. But this is also a brilliant chance to step inside them, too. The hope is you'll leave with a better appreciation of his genius.