You Are Invited, Juergen Teller’s terrific inaugural exhibition at the new Athens gallery Onassis Ready, is sprawling and revealing. The German auteur started his career in the gritty, grimy days of 1990s London by shooting for fashion magazines like The Face and i-D. Since then, he’s become known for his unflinching eye and ability to pierce the veneer of glamour and celebrity with robust humanity and humour. His exhibition, on view through December 30, includes hundreds of images taken throughout his life, from intimate self-portraits of him and Dovile Drizyte—his wife and creative partner—to his most famous fashion campaigns, like Victoria Beckham trapped in a Marc Jacobs bag. Below, Teller discusses his work and enduring drive to make new art.
The exhibition is staged over two vast floors of the gallery, which, until recently, was a plastics factory. Did the Onassis Foundation give you carte blanche?
I liked [Artistic Director of the Onassis Foundation, Afroditi Panagiotakou’s] belief in me and her enthusiasm. It’s the same when I work with a fashion designer. It’s not like some art director calls up and there’s a storyboard and you enact it—it’s better when I have a direct ongoing relationship, as it has been with Marc Jacobs, Demna, or Phoebe Philo.
The exhibition starts with a translated text from Plato’s The Symposium about love. It fits beautifully, as Dovile and I are working together, living together, we think a lot the same and sometimes simultaneously. I had this idea that we were merging our bodies together hence the double exposures of our bodies together [in the image] that opens the show.
The show is deeply autobiographical. It includes a 1964 photograph your father, Walter Teller, took of you as an infant covered in baby powder, alongside a 2003 nude self-portrait where you’re positioned on your father’s grave with beer, cigarettes, and a football. You reveal he committed suicide in 1988.
That picture was about longing to be closer to my father. I realized a few years after his suicide that he can’t have been just a complete asshole and a horrible person, which I thought before. He’s my flesh and blood. There must have been something positive and good within, otherwise my mother wouldn’t have gone there. He was an enthusiastic photographer, and it shocked me how good he was. That picture of me as a baby, it could have been my photograph.
What would the young man in that self-portrait say to you now?
He would be amazed at where his life had taken him. I could have easily ended up in my home village as an alcoholic like my father. You have just one life and you can take it away from yourself or you can do something with it. I didn’t want to be a loser, and I didn’t want to go to the army in Germany. I came to England [in 1986.] I had to make it. It was horrible at the beginning in London, it was very, very difficult to survive.
You’ve been collaborating with Drizyte since 2018. Your life with her and your youngest daughter, Iggy, is the subject of so many photographs in the show. In the series We’re Building our Future Together (2021), you and Drizyte wear neon workwear and hard hats, posing as construction workers in Venice and Naples. It makes me smile because you are both constantly constructing and deconstructing ideas.
It is important to have fun in your life—to do something serious, but to have a sense of humor. Dovile brings an incredible amount of positivity into my life. There was a point when I got quite negative and sort of bored with fashion photography. It made me really happy and content working with designers—with Phoebe Philo for 10, Marc Jacobs for 17, and Vivienne Westwood for so long. Now, the industry demands the sort of endless churning out of shit.
Certain things are extremely interesting, but the weight for me changed; the importance for me is the other [projects] I do.
In the show, there’s a video of you doing a happy baby pose in the nude atop a grand piano while being serenaded by Charlotte Rampling. When did this impulse to be your own subject begin?
That started around 2000, when I was bored and couldn’t be bothered with the vanity of all these actors and dealing with agents. I thought, I’m always around. I’m not worse or better than them. I wanted to feel like how it is to be photographed by myself. It was very interesting to see what it felt like to be photographed by me, what it does and all the vulnerability.
Giorgio Vasari, the 16th century Italian artist and historian, wrote about the three ages of an artist: the early years are marked by wild experimentation. In the middle years, that experimentation synthesizes with technical mastery. The third age moves beyond mastery—the artist may turn toward spirituality or abstraction. This show is described as a mid-career survey. Do you see that arc in your own work?
I feel fully emerged into who I am, confident and knowing exactly what I want to do and play with. I don’t have that angst of not knowing what to do. Because life, if I relax enough, will bring something to me that catapults me into something super exciting.
Source: W Magazine