In 2015, photographer Henrik Saxgren started working on a book about Tøndermarsken, a unique biotope located in the south-west of Jutland along the Wadden Sea. For the project he teamed up with art historian and former chairman of the New Carlsberg Foundation, Hans Edvard Nørregaard-Nielsen.
More than twenty excursions and three years later, the book is a reality and will be launched on April 6 by Denmark’s leading publishing house, Gyldendal. On that same date, an exhibition of photographs from the book, fittingly named “Tøndermarsken”, will open at the acclaimed Tønder Museum of Art.
As a tribute to the project and the artist, whom the gallery represents internationally, a small selection of Henrik Saxgren’s works from the book will be exhibited in the Hans Alf Gallery project room, starting Friday April 5, alongside Louise Hindsgavl’s “Becoming Undone” in the main gallery, and continuing through April 27.
Saxgren’s images of Tøndermarsken almost come across as photographic meditations, which in turn allows for a new space in this otherwise flat marshland to emerge. By primarily working at dawn and in the evening twilight, Saxgren manages to open a door to a timeless world, which revolves around much more than a mere geographical location.
Author Peter Høgh previously wrote about Saxgren’s landscape images:
”Photographs are somehow doors that open inwards. To a human being or to a landscape. But a photograph does not just open inwards. A photograph opens both ways. It is a portal through which you can access the world. But the world also gains access to you. It is as if the motif penetrates you and settles in you. You cannot fend it off. It wants to tell you something and starts living in you, and so you are changed from within and from the outside.”