Wim Wenders’ international renown began very early. His films Paris, Texas and The American Friend became icons of cinematography, in which the director invented a new form of storytelling — a slow, metaphorical language akin to the writing of a poem. His latest film, Perfect Days, forms another narrative architecture in which time and space, the protagonist and the light of nature, find the momentum of a luminous connection arising from everyday life, as if life always began late. We also discover his important photographic work, created over the years while preparing his films, in widely different places around the world, like imaginary narratives through which one senses how a moment in a landscape, in a space, is felt. In this meticulous study of atmospheres, everything seems suspended. And yet, the question of why that moment was significant retains its mystery. The new photographs by Wim Wenders, presented in the first part of our exhibition, were taken during a stay in Chinese landscapes. They reveal spaces with vast horizons, landscapes whose pictorial space expands while remaining present, where visitors appear like a quiet hum before disappearing again in the distance. The figures in these images resemble traces of a fleeting inscription. The photographs of major Chinese cities are dominated by the forms, colors, and passers-by of urban life, fixed at the moment they are seen, as in any photograph. And yet, the conversation of things changes in the next instant — and we, too, will be different. A second part of the exhibition is devoted to a slightly greater distance from the images of China. And yet, in the snapshots of the forest, we find the same echo of silence — this forest that for centuries has linked earth and sky. Wim Wenders perceives there the magical luminous phenomena of high summer, this Romantic forest that was once, for Germans, the untouchable cathedral of desire, and in which the young Goethe wrote in 1780 the dreamlike Wanderer’s Night Song (Wanderers Nachtlied) in the moonlight. On the occasion of his 80th birthday, the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn is dedicating a major retrospective exhibition to Wim Wenders’ films and photographs from 1 August 2025. The exhibition will be closed on 8 and 29 May 2025.