Wim Wenders
NEARBY AND FAR AWAY. PHOTOGRAPHY.
2 MAY until 26 JUL 2025
Opening – 2 MAY 2025, 6-9 pm
Wim Wenders’ international fame began early. His films »Paris, Texas« and »The American Friend« became icons of cinematography, in which the director invented a new kind of storytelling, a slow metaphorical language that resembles the creation of a poem.
Wim Wenders,
China I, 2019, 2025
Fine Art Inkjet on Museo Max
71 x 107 cm/ 28 x 42 in. [H x W]
Ed. No.: 1/1 + 1 AP
[framed]
© Wenders Images, Courtesy Galerie Bastian
His latest film »Perfect Days« is another architecture of storytelling, in which time and space, the protagonist and the light in nature find the pull of a bright connection from an everyday life, as if life always began late. But we also see his significant photographic work, created during the years of preparing his films in the most diverse places in the world, as imaginary narratives in which we discover how a moment in a landscape, in a space, is perceived. Everything stands still in this dedicated study of moods. Nevertheless, the question of why this moment was significant retains its mystery.
Wim Wenders’ new photographs in the first part of our exhibition were taken during a stay in Chinese landscapes. They show us spaces with vast horizons, landscapes whose pictorial space extends and yet appears present, in which the visitors appear like a humming calmness and quickly disappear again into the distance. The people in these pictures resemble the traces of a passing inscription.
Wim Wenders
Wald IV, 2020, 2025
Fine Art Inkjet on Museo Max
71 x 83.8 cm/ 28 x 33 in. [H x W]
Ed. No.: 1/1 + 1 AP
[framed]
© Wenders Images, Courtesy Galerie Bastian
The photographs of China’s large cities are dominated by shapes, colours and passers-by in urban life, paused at the moment they are seen, as in every photograph. And yet the conversation of things will change in the next moment and we too will be others.
A second part of the exhibition is dedicated to a seemingly barely greater distance from the pictures from China. And yet in the snapshots of the forest we encounter the same echo of silence, the forest that for centuries connected the earth with the sky. Wim Wenders sees the magical light phenomena from the deep centre of summer, the romantic forest that was once the untouchable cathedral of longing for the Germans, in which the young Goethe wrote the dreaming »Wanderers’ Night Song« in 1780.
