Marnix Goossens

Art Education and the Decision to Photograph Existing Places

Born in Leeuwarden in 1967, Goossens studied at the Utrecht School of the Arts, De Ateliers in Arnhem, and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, completing his residency in 2000^*21. The AkzoNobel Art Foundation describes his work as moving among nature, portraiture, and still life while tracing the marks that human habits and desires leave on objects and environments^*18. The Rijksmuseum records his photobooks and commissioned projects in its collection database^*4, while UMC Utrecht notes how easily overlooked details acquire an unexpected presence within his images^*14.

Across these bodies of work, Goossens repeatedly points his camera toward interiors, plantings, household objects, and dikes already in use. A 2003 documentary shows him carefully photographing a single willow in the landscape and describes his images as realistic with a slight Surrealist inflection^*22. Photographing an existing place preserves more than the wallpaper pattern: it also records a resident’s choice of product, the age and repair of a building, and the path of incoming light. No single author controls the arrangements in these pictures. The decisions of residents, designers, maintenance workers, and organizations responsible for planting or flood defense remain embedded in the details of the site.

Dutch Photography and Artificial Landscapes Since the 1990s

In the Netherlands, reclamation, dikes, roads, housing developments, and planting continually shape the contours of the country. Since the 1990s, photographers have increasingly approached land as an environment where planning, agriculture, tourism, recreation, and water management overlap. The exhibition catalogue Nature as Artifice identified this tendency as a new Dutch landscape^*16. Research from Leiden University likewise traces the simultaneous emergence of elevated views of development sites, repeated signs of maintenance, and close attention to everyday decoration^*11.

In 2000, Goossens received a commission in Almere, a city built on reclaimed land, and photographed young trees, lawns, gardens, and ornamental plants. He chose the height and distance of everyday viewing instead of an overview of the urban plan. Leaves, support stakes, spacing between trees, and the surface of the soil make the logic of planning tangible. Large-scale land design and the routines of tending a garden meet within the same color photograph.

Yonder—The “Elsewhere” Placed Indoors

Yonder focuses on tropical wallpaper, posters, tiles, plastic wood grain, and window light inside deteriorating rooms. Foam calls these motifs “surrogate nature” and describes them as traces of longing for another place within confined interiors^*1. The title refers to an elsewhere beyond the present location. Nature appears as a secondary image that someone bought, installed, looked at, and eventually abandoned. Longing and disappointment, consolation and inexpensive decoration, occupy the same surface.

Why Yonder Uses Existing Interiors

Photography is essential to Yonder because it can retain both the mountains or forests printed on wallpaper and the condition of the room that contains them. Foam notes how floral tiles and adhesive coverings convey a desire for faraway places^*1. By photographing real interiors, Goossens records the selected motif, the room’s confinement, the wallpaper seams and peeling edges, and reflected light at once. The desire for nature appears within an environment assembled by residents through products and architecture.

A technical camera requires deliberate preparation. Its slowness allows Goossens to reconsider the entire wall and hold both image and support in focus. A crop of the tropical scene alone would turn the motif into decoration. Including the room reveals how the distant place was purchased as a commodity and how long it has remained in use. The camera’s resolution gives equal precision to printed nature and to the domestic setting that carries it.

Regarding Nature—Looking at Nature in the New City of Almere

Regarding Nature examines plantings, development sites, gardens, and interior decoration in Almere. A study of Dutch photography from Leiden University argues that the city’s engineered character supports a larger question: which landscapes are accepted as nature?^*11 The catalogue Nature as Artifice observes that Goossens photographed cultivated nature—pink flowers and lawns, for example—with light humor and surprise instead of reducing it to a diagram of criticism^*16. Nature in the planned city appears as an unfinished environment that residents grow, decorate, and invest with meaning. A Rijksmuseum bibliographic record confirms that the publication was produced around the nature of Almere^*5.

Windows, Reflections, and Light—The Thresholds of Deep Light

In Deep Light, windows, glass, and reflected illumination recur as thresholds between interior and exterior. The Van Abbemuseum library record places the project within the circulation of artist books and exhibition publications^*12. Huis Marseille describes Goossens as moving between intimate interiors and public exteriors, presenting a personally inflected way of seeing nature^*2. A window opens onto a landscape, yet reflection overlays the room of the viewer, making every outward gaze pass through the present domestic environment.

Catch and the Perceptual Delay of Still Life

In Catch, 2012, familiar objects and light form a still life whose meaning does not settle immediately. Foam presents the photograph as an example of Goossens’s attention to detail and compositional control^*6. His still lifes delay recognition. Color, texture, and illumination take precedence over the known use or scale of an object, returning household things to a briefly unnamed visual state.

Editing Yonder as a Photobook

Yonder edits seven years of photographs through recurring wallpaper, windows, artificial materials, and light. Roma Publications describes these substitutes for nature as signs of a desire for freedom, independence, and the natural world, and records the book as a 132-page publication with a text by Maria Barnas^*17. Each turn of the page enters a different room, while tropical and woodland scenes remain trapped on paper or plastic surfaces. The sequence gives repeated form to the desire for elsewhere and links separate interiors into a psychological geography.

“Rising Waters”—Hydraulic Tension in Quiet Images

For a Rijksmuseum commission, Goossens photographed dikes, dunes, revetments, waves, and life along the water. The museum publication Het wassende water edits dikes, dunes, and waves into a series on Dutch water management^*19. Quiet color photographs of flood defenses, flat terrain, and everyday use keep the country’s dependence on repeated design and maintenance present beneath the surface. Wallpaper and hydraulic structures operate at different scales, yet both maintain a desired environment through artificial means. Huis Marseille likewise brought together the engineered Dutch landscape and the threat of rising water within a single exhibition context^*3.

Cowboy Couple, Cloud, and Silver—From Images of Nature to Manufactured Things

The Stedelijk Museum’s Cowboy Couple shows how borrowed roles and images enter everyday interiors^*7. In Cloud, an atmospheric phenomenon is replaced by an object or printed image, turning nature into a portable surface^*8. Silver, which entered the Stedelijk context through the Sanders Collection, is recorded as a work that brings material reflection into contact with the photographic surface^*13. Together, these works show that Goossens’s inquiry extends beyond plants and landscape to the distinctions photography draws between ready-made images and physical things.

Nature as Artifice and Contemporary Photographs of Engineered Landscapes

Leiden University research traces the rise, since the 1980s, of Dutch landscape photography concerned with land shaped and managed by people, culminating in the nineteen projects assembled in the 2008 exhibition Nature as Artifice^*11. The same study places Regarding Nature alongside Hans van der Meer’s views behind amateur soccer fields, Bas Princen’s construction sites and leisure landscapes, Erwin Driessens and Maria Verstappen’s yearlong study of a single park, and Gert Jan Kocken’s photographs of overmanaged land^*11. Goossens brought the engineered landscape close to the level of decoration: repeated saplings, flat arrangements of flowers, and wallpaper seams. Aperture’s touring-exhibition material presented this tendency as a new Dutch landscape in which nature, architecture, planning, and images overlap^*10.

Separating Existing Arrangements from Photographic Decisions

Huis Marseille describes Goossens as an artist who draws out the strangeness embedded in everyday life through viewpoint and framing^*2. Existing interiors and household objects allow decorative choices, cleanliness, repairs, and combinations of products to register as forms of daily staging. A Wall Street Journal review of the 2011 exhibition Still/Life singled out Melon, a watermelon placed on a chair, as an example of unease produced through arrangement and color^*20. An international still-life exhibition in 2018 likewise presented him as a photographer who reconsiders the reality of ordinary things^*15. His careful compositions keep existing arrangements and photographic decisions distinct enough to be compared.

Almere, Interiors, and Dikes as Three Artificial Environments

Regarding Nature shows young trees and gardens in Almere as landscapes planted in anticipation of future greenery. In Yonder, distant landscapes purchased by residents remain on interior walls. In Het wassende water, dikes and revetments protect land below sea level as part of everyday life. The Stedelijk Museum’s exhibition of contemporary Dutch photography presented Goossens through both the national photography collection and the culture of the photobook^*9.

Viewed together, the three series reveal different agents and scales within the broad category of artificial nature. In Almere, urban planning meets residents’ gardening; indoors, product industries meet personal choice; along the dikes, public administration meets civil engineering. Goossens moves close to support stakes, wallpaper seams, and the joints of revetments. His chosen distance presents institutions through places that have been built, used, and maintained.