‘Tragedy, humour, beauty, absurdity’: Juergen Teller on his major new show

“I want to capture everything in my photographs: tragedy and humour, beauty and absurdity,” Juergen Teller says, his voice cutting through over Zoom from his studio in London as I stand in his new exhibition, you are invited, set in a former industrial factory, now Onassis Ready, on the outskirts of Athens city 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 always balanced honesty, wit, and stark imagery, and 40 years in, he is still reinventing the rules. you are invited is vast, sprawling across two floors, and pulling his entire world into focus: family and love, politics and faith, personal trauma and joy, all filtered through 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 happened, it hit me hard. I’m an immigrant, and suddenly everything felt different. England had always seemed open, positive, international, and suddenly it felt small, closed off, negative. I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ Born in 1964 in Erlangen, a quiet, conservative town in West Germany, Teller grew up in the shadow of postwar Europe. His father’s suicide at the age of 47 carved an early fault line that would continue to reverberate through his artistic practice: the need to look at what others might turn away from, and to find truth in the uncomfortable. In the mid-1980s, Teller left for London with almost nothing but a camera and that instinct to confront chaos, which became the foundation of his visual language as an artist.

Now celebrated as one of the most influential photographers of his generation, Teller has never really cared for fashion in the conventional sense. Style, glamour, even beauty, are secondary to his interest in “what a person stands for”.  He is drawn less to surfaces than to the contradictions and ideals behind the image. When photographing Björk in the Blue Lagoon in Iceland in the 1990s, for instance, he fixated not on her eccentric persona but 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 camera has always been a tool of recognition rather than performance: a way to find a sense of truth in the people and worlds around him.

The show stretches across decades of Teller’s practice, from his iconic 1990s portraits of Kate Moss in bed, her dyed pink hair strewn on the pillow, haloing her face, to nudes of Vivienne Westwood lounging on a sofa, filmmaker Agnès Varda holding her cat in Paris, and a bare-chested Iggy Pop pressed against a tree trunk. His subversive luxury campaigns also appear. The infamous Victoria Beckham crawling out of a shopping bag bearing her own name, and Daniel Craig in that Belvedere Vodka advert, leaning back in a black vest, eyes glazed and bottle in hand. More intimate moments punctuate the exhibition, of tender self-portraits of his young child, Iggy (named after Iggy Pop), and photographs of the morning coffee that Teller makes daily for his partner, Dovile Drizyte, alongside photographs of Pope Francis taken during a Vatican commission.

“Afroditi Panagiotakou, the Artistic Director of Onassis, asked me about three years ago to have a show in Athens,” he recalls, when I asked him how the exhibition came 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 process. “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 series (2024–25), Teller and his wife and creative partner, Dovile Drizyte appear nude, rolling together on a Greek beach, their bodies layered in semi-transparent exposures until they almost dissolve into a single hybrid form. Throughout the series, still lifes of fish innards, taxidermied rabbits, chimpanzees, and sun-bleached landscapes punctuate the sequence, a visceral counterpoint to the dead, bound-up and on display with the tenderness of the embracing human bodies. The effect is at once 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 much of Teller’s work, what first appears chaotic gradually reveals an intricate emotional logic. The photographs are steeped in his lifelong preoccupation with love, absurdity and nature, but in Symposium of Love, these ideas take on a mythic resonance. Teller had been thinking about Athens and Aristophanes’ myth from Plato’s Symposium, the story of humans once whole, later divided, forever seeking their lost halves. In Teller’s version, this search for unity becomes literal: two bodies entwined, dissolving into one another, reaching for a moment of wholeness that can never fully be sustained.

Politics has always been a quiet undercurrent through Teller’s work. In Athens, that current surfaces more explicitly with an entire section of the show devoted to his long friendships with Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett, both fearless in using fashion as a political tool. In one large-scale photograph, Hamnett wears her T-shirt emblazoned Disgusted to be British, standing before a graffiti-tagged garage that reads Don’t Save the Queen. In another, she pulls at her shirt that reads Bring Back God, her nails painted in the Palestinian flag. For Teller, the personal is always 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 assignment, photographing Pope Francis at the Giudecca Women’s Prison in Venice during the 2024 Biennale, marked a profound shift in Teller’s practice. Shown at you are invited for the first time, the images reveal a fragile equilibrium between the sacred and the broken: the grit of the prison walls against 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 spiritual motif deepens in a space Teller crafted to resemble a chapel. Along the walls hang photographs from his Italian Harper’s Bazaar commission (June–August 2025), shot to mark the Catholic Church’s Jubilee year. The images trace a strange, elegiac journey through Italy’s churches, from grand marble sanctuaries in Rome to modest church halls on the outskirts of Trieste and Rimini. Models such as Mariacarla Boscono and Alex Consani appear in sombre, sculptural looks, their stillness set against the baroque excess of gilded altars and carved marble angels. In the apse of the space, a small built structure screens Men (2023), a video that pairs Teller with actor Alexander Skarsgård, frolicking nearly naked through the snow in Luleå, Sweden. The piece reimagines a story told by Teller’s father-in-law, of enduring the freezing temperatures whilst building a power plant in Siberia during his military service. Teller restages this story, which stands in stark contrast to Teller’s fraught relationship with his own father. 

“The exhibition is very carefully thought through and curated. Everything in there has meant something to me,” Teller says. A sense of play still runs through the work, and Teller’s signature sense of humour, which is deadpan and slightly perverse, slices through the show’s heavier moments. When I ask about humour’s role in confronting difficult subjects, he shrugs lightly: “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 are invited, carries that 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 exactly what this show is: an invitation into the chaotic, magnificent contradictions of his world, and an artist looking back on a lifetime of unwavering honesty, and forward to something still defiantly alive. 

Juergen Teller’s you are invited is running at Onassis Ready until 30 December 2025.