COPENHAGEN.- Wim Wenders has long since made his mark as a film-maker and visual artist. With Places, strange and quiet Wenders has assembled a fascinating and unusual series of large-format photographs shot all around the world. From Italy, Japan and Germany to Armenia and the USA, from iconic images of facades and buildings, known and unknown, to panoramic depictions of cities and landscapes, the exhibition presents the grand spectrum of Wenders’ work.
The pictures have typically been taken in connection with Wenders’ many travels to participate in film festivals, research and film shootings. They run as an independent track through his artistic career, and show his ability to bring out and underscore the neglected, the spectacular and the unsaid.
The exhibition presents more than 20 photographs by the famous film director and artist from the past 30 years. The exhibition at GL STRAND concludes the exhibition’s major tour, which has gone the rounds of leading exhibition venues and museums all over the world.
Wenders has himself said of the journeys and his photographs: “When you travel a lot, and when you love just wandering around and getting lost, you can end up in the oddest places. I’m enormously attracted by many different places. As soon as I look at a map, with the names of mountains, villages, rivers, lakes or similar formations, I get excited as long as I don’t know them and have never been there ... I think I’ve enhanced my sensitivity to the things that are out there. Everyone turns right, because that’s where the interesting things are, but I turn left. where there isn’t anything! And quite rightly: soon I’m standing in front of my kind of place. I don’t know if it’s a kind of built-in radar that often directs me to the places that are strangely quiet or oddly calm.”
The pictures demonstrate Wenders’ ability to bring out the unique character of the individual landscapes by focusing on what the rest of us do not see: a strange convergence of circumstances, an involuntarily humorous clash, and above all mankind’s influence on a landscape that continues to develop and change.
For some years now
GL STRAND has had a special focus on the interaction of art and film. Under the heading “Art Moves” GL STRAND has turned the spotlight on the interplay of the arts and how cross- aesthetic projects are able to include and challenge a new, different and wider art public.
Wim Wenders is a multifaceted artist and one of the most successful modern film-makers. At an early stage he made his name as a leading example of New German Cinema in the 1970s, and became a cult figure on the international film scene in the middle of the 1980s. In 1983, in connection with research for the film Paris, Texas (1984) he began using photography as an independent medium. There is a clear aesthetic line from Wenders’ filmic universe to his photographic works. This can be seen for example in the documentary film The Salt of the Earth, which he has directed with Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, and which will be released in the autumn of 2014.
Right now Wenders is busy finishing the film Everything will be Fine. He has also directed an instalment of the documentary film series Cathedrals of Culture from 2013/2014, which with the aid of the 3D film technique tries to capture the architectural soul of six iconic buildings. Wenders has directed several highly acclaimed documentaries, including The Buena Vista Social Club (1999), a portrait of Cuban musicians, and Soul of a Man (2003), about the American blues. In recent years he has made a succession of highly experimental documentary films, several of which have been shot in 3D, challenging the normal criteria for documentation, as can be seen in the film Pina from 2011. In addition he continues to make feature films and visual art. Wenders has also directed many music videos for bands like U2 and Talking Heads, including “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” and “Sax and violins”.
