you are invited | Juergen Teller

This mid-career survey presents various series, individual works, numerous videos, and combines Teller’s selections from previous exhibitions and portfolios, with new, unpublished images, from the 1990s to today, including iconic images (such as his portraits of Iggy Pop, Kate Moss and Charlotte Rampling), still-lifes and family portraits. This forthcoming solo exhibition encourages retrospection between past and present work, celebrating Teller’s re-energized perspective to form an active dialogue that acknowledges the shifting modes of exploration in his creative journey.

While Teller has always made personal work, this exhibition shows a new sense of purpose triggered by recent projects, such as photographing Pope Francis in a women’s prison during the 2024 Venice Biennale and his invitation to photograph Auschwitz for the 80th anniversary of its liberation earlier this year. In addition to such public commissions, in the past eight years, Teller has collaborated with his wife, Dovile Drizyte, on projects that reflect various aspects of their relationship and the birth of their daughter. These works are defined by a typical mixture of serious, intimate, yet often humorous characters created in the style of the grotesque.

These life-changing experiences have generated a deeper intensity regarding the way Teller responds to the world around him, forming profound connections and translating them into meaningful narratives. His resulting photographic and video works explore familial and universal stories of love, trust, hope, fertility, environment, politics and religion. Consequently, Teller’s heightened emotional bond with his subject matter embodies a positivity, spiritual awareness and renewed attitude to life.

"you are invited" will be presented in Athens, Greece, from 19 October to 30 December 2025, as part of the international opening of Onassis Ready, a new multidisciplinary space launched by Onassis Stegi, located in a restored factory in the city’s industrial zone. Designed to host experimental, boundary-pushing work and to serve as a platform for bold creative voices from around the world, Onassis Ready also hosts the Athens hub of Onassis ONX – an international program, also based in New York, that supports artists working with emerging technologies. With a dual focus on contemporary art and innovation, Onassis Ready launches its first major exhibition, as part of the 2025–2026 artistic program of Onassis Stegi, marking Juergen Teller’s most expansive solo presentation in Greece to date.

This collaboration between Juergen Teller and Onassis Stegi reflects a shared belief that art can be both intimate and political, raw and poetic, personal and collective. Through this partnership, you are invited opens up a space for dialogue between Teller’s emotionally charged universe and the contemporary realities of Greece, inviting a meaningful encounter between the local and the global.

Afroditi Panagiotakou, Artistic Director of Onassis Foundation comments: "This is where it begins. We’re opening the doors of our new venue with an exhibition by Juergen Teller—an artist who reshapes the standards, whose work pulses with life —where the political clashes with the intimate, where raw, unfiltered emotion meets the quiet strength and vulnerability of family. Set on the edge of the city, Onassis Ready, is set to become a meeting place where stories simmer, boundaries blur and unexpected encounters emerge. Juergen Teller's show will be more than an exhibition. It’s an invitation: to feel, to question, to belong".

In conversation, Juergen Teller speaks as he photographs: with brutal honesty, humor, and a disarming openness. His words, like his images, move between intimacy and rebellion, capturing the contradictions of the human condition. What follows is a glimpse into his mind, an artist who finds beauty in imperfection, meaning in risk, and truth in vulnerability.

These are his words from a conversation with Afroditi Panagiotakou, Artistic Director of the Onassis Foundation, at Onassis Ready on October 17, 2025.

About the title “you are invited”

“I wanted it to be something positive, that you’re invited to look at it, to experience it, to have thoughts, to have a dream. The title of the exhibition actually came from a letter that came through the door at Easter time. It was an invitation from the church. I thought, ‘This is a brilliant title, and I’m going to use it.’

And I invite everybody to look at it and to experience it. It’s about my way of seeing things, my way of experiencing life, and what can be done, and all the heaviness, the tragedies, the beauty, and everything really, what I encounter in life.”

How to look at the exhibition

“I wanted it to be open to anybody else’s imagination, to figure things out. Otherwise, I would have written it down in black and white. Certain things are clear, and certain things are open.

You come in, you see this opening here, and a line here, photographs here, and then you go over there, and it says, ‘you are invited.’ Then you go into the beginning of my life, when my father photographed me as a baby, and my father’s suicide, and so on. And then it goes deeper. Inside is very much, in a way, the heartbeat of my life, and my work with Dovile, my wife.”

It’s always the place

“It always has something to do, wherever you do it, with the place and the culture of that particular place in mind. The exhibition would look different somewhere else.

I don’t want to have a bunch of framed photographs that are exactly the same, traveling from city to city. That would be totally boring for me. I want to be excited myself. I want to be alive and new and fresh, and not just have this work travel around unchanged.”

About freedom on the wall

“There are numerous reasons. Some are aesthetic. I like to see punctuation within the frame. Others are practical. I like to live with the work, to be spontaneous, to put it on the wall where I want it.

It would have been a nightmare and extremely costly to have everything framed. I want to be free.”

But first, you touch things

“For me, all these photographs are kind of objects in a way. You touch them. When I make a catalog or a book, I have everything in my studio—long tables with lots of work—and I move them around. Afterwards, you can put it on the computer and make one a bit smaller and another a bit bigger. But first, you touch things. That’s what my work is all about.”

About his studio

“[…] The studio is, for me, more a place to work, to think, to curate this exhibition, to build, to make a larger model, to work on it, to have my work around. It gives me ideas. Sometimes, of course, I photograph in it.”

About his film “Men”

“It’s a kind of love letter to my father-in-law, to my dead father, and to male friendship. There’s a story within that film. I wanted to have outside these women and inside the men. My mother is an incredibly important figure in my life, who supported me when I moved to London and had no money.”

About his father

“When I wanted to be a photographer, my father slapped me. He thought photographers just take passport pictures and wedding pictures, and that it’s not an occupation. ‘You have to do something proper.’

So on many levels, ‘Men’ makes sense to me personally. The women represent my mother, and inside are my dad and my father-in-law, who I’m closer to than I ever was with my father.

To re-enact that story, I didn’t just want a friend. I wanted some Hollywood oomph, like Alexander Skarsgård to hack off my shit.”

About photographing himself

“It started around the year 2000, when I got a little bit tired and bored of photographing actors and actresses and celebrities, and I got slightly tired of their vanities.

I just thought, how does it feel to be photographed by myself? What does the camera do? How can I direct it? How can I pose? And I learned a lot through photographing myself.

And actually, very simple, I’m always around. Is Brad Pitt, Isabelle Huppert, or me better than anybody else? It’s me. So I started to think like that.”

About photographing everyone

“When I became very well known as a fashion photographer, people asked me to travel the world and photograph these super successful supermodels, Stephanie Seymour, Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, and Linda Evangelista. And I thought, I don’t want to travel to America all the time. I got bored with it. How is it to be just in my studio and let them come to me and photograph that?

We became famous pretty much together, Kate Moss and I, when we were young. Everybody wanted to find the new Kate Moss, the new supermodel. For me, it was the opposite. I wanted to democratize the whole scenario.

When I was young, I thought I could only photograph someone I was attracted to, someone I admired, someone I liked. That was the only possible way. That exercise, over the course of a year, really helped me to open up and photograph everyone and anything. Even people I didn’t care about, or didn’t like, or very much liked. I tried to do the best possible photograph of every person.”

Curiosity over judgment

“It enabled me to say, ‘Yes, I am actually interested and curious about photographing O. J. Simpson.’ He’s obviously not a nice person. He killed two people. Is it okay to photograph this person or not? My curiosity was too strong, and I wanted to photograph him. That helped me to photograph other people. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as my heart is in it, my instinct is in it, and my intellect is stimulated.”

About vulnerability

“I learned a lot from my upbringing, from the heaviness of it, my father’s aggression, and his suicide. I was never afraid of jumping into the cold water, of doing something, of not being on safe ground. You have to take risks.

That kind of vulnerability is just in you. It’s what I do. To be open and say, ‘Fuck, I’m not quite sure how I’m going to do this now.’ And then the other person becomes open, and there’s an honest conversation about humanity. And you do it.”

About video/fashion campaigns

“First, it started with my writing. That’s a voice in a way. When I began doing fashion work, I just didn’t like all this fast-cutting, overproduced stuff. You add some borrowed music, and it feels like everyone does the same thing. As I can’t play the piano or any instrument, I thought, ‘I have vocal cords. It’s me. It’s like my self-portraits. I’m here, I’m using it.’ Sometimes I use the cheapest things available to make it good. That’s my voice. Talking over the videos makes perfect sense, because I’m there.”

About humor and fashion

“Fashion photography is so serious, and so dry, and so boring most of the time. And so repetitive. They’re looking back at the past of what was good, whether it’s Richard Avedon, Guy Bourdin, or Helmut Newton, and it’s endlessly ripped off again. And now people copy me.

Fashion should be fun. People should enjoy themselves. It’s like a theatre. It’s like a dream. It’s like a fantasy. You can do wonderful things, and it can be humorous. I’m very serious with my humor.”

About being photographed

“Sometimes I get photographed quite a lot. And it’s always an individual experience. But I’m amazed by the insensitivity of recognizing certain situations. They just go there, and you stay there like a fucking lemon, and they photograph, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, with no interaction.

Sometimes you don’t even know if they’ve clicked. There’s no communication. For me, it’s very important to communicate with the person. You don’t have to talk a novel, but you have to connect. Sometimes I feel it’s nearly there, but not quite working. Then I say, ‘Let’s take a break, go outside, and have a coffee.’ After that, something opens up.

I depend on the person I photograph. I’m open to their thoughts and ideas. Some are stupid, some are good. But I am the director. Communication is important.”

About social media

“It’s a conscious decision not to be engaged with it. I engage with younger people through my work, through my exhibitions, through publishing my work, and through the advertising and commercial work I do. They publish it on Instagram, so there’s no need for me to do it myself.

I think it’s tremendously dangerous to look at the screen all the time. It’s not healthy. And to do it intelligently takes a tremendous amount of work, like publishing a book or creating an exhibition. You have to think about what you put on the screen and what comes next. Not just, ‘I’m in Athens,’ or ‘Here’s a nice sunset.’ That doesn’t mean anything to me. Everybody does it. It would take too much time to create something meaningful, so I stay away from it. And so far, within my popularity, I don’t need it.”

Opening in October 2025, in the heart of the Agios Ioannis Rentis district of Athens, an old plastics factory has been transformed into something completely new: Onassis Ready. A raw, generous space for artists to dream, rehearse, and take risks. Spread across 3,760 square meters, it’s the newest creative hub in the Onassis Foundation’s ever-growing creative ecosystem.

Onassis Ready is more than a building. It’ is a space that listens, adapts, and invites. A place where Athens meets New York and the world, where the post-digital meets the deeply human. Where tomorrow’s ideas can be tested loudly, quietly, wildly.

Onassis Ready, Strati Tsirka 2, Ag. Ioannis Rentis

Access by public transport:
By bus: Line 838, Stops: 2nd Agias Annis (300 m) | School 3rd Agias Annis (280 m)
By trolleybus: Line 21, Stop: Papadopoulou (1.3 km)
By metro: Line 3, Station: Eleonas (2.4 km)

By UBER:

Get 30% off for two of your rides with the code READY30. Follow the link and plan your ride to and from the exhibition.

As part of Juergen Teller’s exhibition “you are invited,” the wine bar in Neos Kosmos “Epta Martyres” [i.e., Seven Witnesses], is curating the bar and the tailor made cocktails at the Onassis Ready. Inspired by French bistros and Volos’ ‘tsipouradiko’ (i.e., tavern-tsipouro bars), they collaborate with NOKELA PROJECT on a menu created exclusively for the exhibition, based on a street food concept that combines international influences with Greek ingredients.

Opening hours: Friday - Sunday, 17:30-23:00, Onassis Ready

On the occasion of the exhibition “you are invited,” discover a curated collection of objects that convey Juergen Teller’s unique aesthetic beyond Onassis Ready. From the official exhibition catalog to collectible photo albums such as “Handbags,” “The Myth,” and “Fashion Photography for America 1999–2016,” cards, posters, and tote bags await you, ready to connect with your own view of the world.

Discover them in the specially designed shop at the exhibition venue.