‘Tragedy, humour, beauty, absurdity’: Juergen Teller on his main new present

“I want to capture everything in my photographs: tragedy and humour, beauty and absurdity,” Juergen Teller says, his voice chopping by means of over Zoom from his studio in London as I stand in his new exhibition, you are invited, set in a former industrial manufacturing unit, now Onassis Ready, on the outskirts of Athens metropolis centre. “Everyone else seems so serious, so contrived. I want to bring everything together, from the funny to the tragic, because that’s life.” Teller’s work has all the time balanced honesty, wit, and stark imagery, and 40 years in, he’s nonetheless reinventing the foundations. you’re invited is huge, sprawling throughout two flooring, and pulling his complete world into focus: household and love, politics and religion, private trauma and pleasure, all filtered by means of the irrepressible and unpredictable eye of Teller.

“This exhibition brings together many threads: my father’s suicide, the environment, Brexit. All of this affects you,” Teller says. “When Brexit occurred, it hit me arduous. I’m an immigrant, and instantly all the pieces felt totally different. England had all the time appeared open, optimistic, worldwide, and instantly it felt small, closed off, damaging. I believed, ‘What am I doing here?’ Born in 1964 in Erlangen, a quiet, conservative city in West Germany, Teller grew up within the shadow of postwar Europe. His father’s suicide on the age of 47 carved an early fault line that will proceed to reverberate by means of his inventive follow: the necessity to take a look at what others would possibly flip away from, and to seek out reality within the uncomfortable. In the mid-Nineteen Eighties, Teller left for London with nearly nothing however a digital camera and that intuition to confront chaos, which grew to become the inspiration of his visible language as an artist.

Now celebrated as some of the influential photographers of his era, Teller has by no means actually cared for style within the standard sense. Style, glamour, even magnificence, are secondary to his curiosity in “what a person stands for”.  He is drawn much less to surfaces than to the contradictions and beliefs behind the picture. When photographing Björk within the Blue Lagoon in Iceland within the Nineteen Nineties, as an illustration, he fixated not on her eccentric persona however on the resemblance between her and her son. “It’s a privilege to do what I do,” he tells me, “to have this machine, the camera, and go on adventures… For me, it’s not just photography. It’s thoughts, ideas, life. It’s what I’m thinking about and interested in.” Teller’s digital camera has all the time been a instrument of recognition relatively than efficiency: a technique to discover a sense of reality within the individuals and worlds round him.

The present stretches throughout many years of Teller’s follow, from his iconic Nineteen Nineties portraits of Kate Moss in mattress, her dyed pink hair strewn on the pillow, haloing her face, to nudes of Vivienne Westwood lounging on a settee, filmmaker Agnès Varda holding her cat in Paris, and a bare-chested Iggy Pop pressed in opposition to a tree trunk. His subversive luxurious campaigns additionally seem. The notorious Victoria Beckham crawling out of a purchasing bag bearing her personal identify, and Daniel Craig in that Belvedere Vodka advert, leaning again in a black vest, eyes glazed and bottle in hand. More intimate moments punctuate the exhibition, of tender self-portraits of his younger youngster, Iggy (named after Iggy Pop), and pictures of the morning espresso that Teller makes day by day for his accomplice, Dovile Drizyte, alongside images of Pope Francis taken throughout a Vatican fee.

“Afroditi Panagiotakou, the Artistic Director of Onassis, asked me about three years ago to have a show in Athens,” he remembers, once I requested him how the exhibition got here into being. “We flew over, looked at many different possibilities… and it was this derelict factory. I thought, instead of having the show in a clean white space, I’d be really interested in using one floor of that factory. Then I realised I actually wanted to use the floor downstairs as well because I had an idea for what I wanted to do there.” He grins, remembering the method. “We built a big model in my studio, and pretty quickly I knew what I wanted to put in it, especially the Symposium of Love series, which is right at the beginning [of the exhibition] when you come in. That was completely new work, and it was first presented there. It was really important to me.”

In the Symposium of Love sequence (2024–25), Teller and his spouse and artistic accomplice, Dovile Drizyte seem nude, rolling collectively on a Greek seaside, their our bodies layered in semi-transparent exposures till they nearly dissolve right into a single hybrid type. Throughout the sequence, nonetheless lifes of fish innards, taxidermied rabbits, chimpanzees, and sun-bleached landscapes punctuate the sequence, a visceral counterpoint to the useless, bound-up and on show with the tenderness of the embracing human our bodies. The impact is without delay primal and elegiac. “It felt beautiful because Dovile and I are always together, working and travelling, and we have a child together,” Teller explains. “I had this idea of two bodies becoming one.” As with a lot of Teller’s work, what first seems chaotic progressively reveals an intricate emotional logic. The images are steeped in his lifelong preoccupation with love, absurdity and nature, however in Symposium of Love, these concepts tackle a mythic resonance. Teller had been serious about Athens and Aristophanes’ delusion from Plato’s Symposium, the story of people as soon as entire, later divided, endlessly in search of their misplaced halves. In Teller’s model, this seek for unity turns into literal: two our bodies entwined, dissolving into each other, reaching for a second of wholeness that may by no means totally be sustained.

Politics has all the time been a quiet undercurrent by means of Teller’s work. In Athens, that present surfaces extra explicitly with a whole part of the present dedicated to his lengthy friendships with Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett, each fearless in utilizing style as a political instrument. In one large-scale {photograph}, Hamnett wears her T-shirt emblazoned Disgusted to be British, standing earlier than a graffiti-tagged storage that reads Don’t Save the Queen. In one other, she pulls at her shirt that reads Bring Back God, her nails painted within the Palestinian flag. For Teller, the private is all the time political. “I’m trying to focus on smaller things, on building a family, being together, rather than blasting out [political opinion],” he says. “Since I’ve been with Dovile, and through our travels, we’ve started going into churches a lot more,” he explains. “They’re such powerful, calming places. Each church is different, full of incredible details… Then I was commissioned by the Vatican to photograph Pope Francis when he visited a women’s prison. That had an immense impact on me. It was incredible to see how he changed the women’s attitudes the moment he arrived. The women transformed completely, from tough and closed off to soft and almost angelic.”

This project, photographing Pope Francis on the Giudecca Women’s Prison in Venice through the 2024 Biennale, marked a profound shift in Teller’s follow. Shown at you’re invited for the primary time, the photographs reveal a fragile equilibrium between the sacred and the damaged: the grit of the jail partitions in opposition to the Pope’s serene presence. “It stayed with me,” Teller says. “For me, it connects to my mother, who helped me come to London and supported me, and to my complicated relationship with my father.”

Downstairs, the non secular motif deepens in an area Teller crafted to resemble a chapel. Along the partitions grasp images from his Italian Harper’s Bazaar fee (June–August 2025), shot to mark the Catholic Church’s Jubilee yr. The pictures hint a wierd, elegiac journey by means of Italy’s church buildings, from grand marble sanctuaries in Rome to modest church halls on the outskirts of Trieste and Rimini. Models similar to Mariacarla Boscono and Alex Consani seem in sombre, sculptural appears to be like, their stillness set in opposition to the baroque extra of gilded altars and carved marble angels. In the apse of the house, a small constructed construction screens Men (2023), a video that pairs Teller with actor Alexander Skarsgård, frolicking almost bare by means of the snow in Luleå, Sweden. The piece reimagines a narrative instructed by Teller’s father-in-law, of putting up with the freezing temperatures while constructing an influence plant in Siberia throughout his army service. Teller restages this story, which stands in stark distinction to Teller’s fraught relationship together with his personal father. 

“The exhibition is very carefully thought through and curated. Everything in there has meant something to me,” Teller says. A way of play nonetheless runs by means of the work, and Teller’s signature sense of humour, which is deadpan and barely perverse, slices by means of the present’s heavier moments. When I ask about humour’s function in confronting tough topics, he shrugs evenly: “I guess that’s just how one sees the world. It’s part of me, just like how Messi just moves and scores, or how Einstein thinks. It’s innate.”

The exhibition’s title, you’re invited, carries that very same spirit of openness. “I remembered photographing a leaflet that came through the letterbox, and it said, ‘You are invited.’ It was around Easter, and I thought, That’s it. I wanted something positive and unjudgmental, an open invitation. Whoever comes to the exhibition, you are invited into my universe,” Teller explains. And that’s precisely what this present is: an invite into the chaotic, magnificent contradictions of his world, and an artist trying again on a lifetime of unwavering honesty, and ahead to one thing nonetheless defiantly alive. 

Juergen Teller’s you are invited is operating at Onassis Ready till 30 December 2025.