Approximate Landscape

In Christoph Engel’s photographs, he looks at the world and its surface structures from a different point of view from our everyday perspective. In them, dense housing developments take on the appearance of an ornamental mesh of interwoven lines. The flat roofs of countless greenhouses become a thick mosaic carpet. Golf courses in a barren, rocky landscape suddenly start to look like the palm of an outstretched hand, and the outlines of farm fields could almost pass for a pattern of sequins adorning decorative cloth. Detailed structures of natural and urban landscapes merge in the distance into expansively laid out constructions. The “transcendent” gaze from above allows abstraction into surfaces and lines, and creates an ambivalent overview of formal clarity and deceptive beauty: the subject matter of these works visualizes the grave consequences of human interventions into nature and the radical transformation of entire swaths of land, pushed to the brink of ecological catastrophe.

In Christoph Engel’s photographs, he looks at the world and its surface structures from a different point of view from our everyday perspective. In them, dense housing developments take on the appearance of an ornamental mesh of interwoven lines. The flat roofs of countless greenhouses become a thick mosaic carpet. Golf courses in a barren, rocky landscape suddenly start to look like the palm of an outstretched hand, and the outlines of farm fields could almost pass for a pattern of sequins adorning decorative cloth. Detailed structures of natural and urban landscapes merge in the distance into expansively laid out constructions. The “transcendent” gaze from above allows abstraction into surfaces and lines, and creates an ambivalent overview of formal clarity and deceptive beauty: the subject matter of these works visualizes the grave consequences of human interventions into nature and the radical transformation of entire swaths of land, pushed to the brink of ecological catastrophe.