Print Gallery (M. C. Escher)

[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][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").

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 Gallery to contain a copy of itself (the Droste effect), rotated clockwise by about 157.63 degrees and shrunk by a factor of about 22.58.

[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.