What is a landscape? This basic question seems to have inspired the Danish photographer Erik Molberg Hansen to make these meter-long panoramas. The artist works empirically with a roll film camera, letting in a tiny bit of landscape at a time, adding layer upon layer of light, air, earth and water over light and dark lengths of meadow – and the world is reborn in the landscape, transformed into idea: this is how it once was…

The process is reminiscent of creation in microcosm and macrocosm, while also testifying to a desire to work on a level of abstraction along the lines of Abstract Expressionism. American artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman filled huge fields with the mystic play of emptiness and form, while another of Molberg Hansen’s inspirations, Jackson Pollock, conquered the mega-canvas with heroic gestures and a will to shape the world in his image.

Henning Wettendorf and Finn Thrane, Editors of KATALOG