The elegant S-curve of a freeway and its counterpoint, huge wind turbines on the hills behind it—Henrik Saxgren (*1953 inRanders, Denmark) searches for and finds artistic potential and creative will in the most obscure places. The title of his series Unintended Sculptures, which he has been working on since 2001, says it all: in nature and the environment, Saxgren discovers relational forms, structures, and optical illusions that seem to have been deliberately placed there by the artist’s hand. To anyone whose eyes are open, it is obvious that those greenhouse-covered fields must have been wrapped by Christo and Jean-Claude—or that these geometrical basalt-rock formations along a section of the coastline looks like an enormous sculptural vision. Saxgren’s eye, schooled in documentary photography, allows him to capture these “sculptures” at the very moment they, as Timothy Persons writes, “best define themselves in the framework of their environments.”

Exhibition schedule:  The National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen, September 20–December 19, 2009