Drawing Hands

Drawing Hands is a lithograph by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, created in 1948. It depicts two life-sized hands apparently rising out of a sheet of paper, each drawing the other into existence.^[1]

The lithograph is an example of Escher’s fascination with paradox and infinity, and invites the observer to contemplate on the interplay of art and reality.^[2]

The cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter has linked Escher’s work to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, according to which it is possible to construct a proposition within any closed system that, while true, can neither be demonstrated or refuted within that same system. In similar vein, Escher shows that an image’s internal cohesion is no guarantee of its truthfulness.^[3]