Bring Back God / Bring Back Juergen Teller

Athens. A factory on the city’s gritty fringe. Concrete floors, cracked windows, the pulse of production replaced by something wilder: the unruly universe of Juergen Teller. His new show “you are invited” isn’t polite. It’s not a nod to his legacy. It’s a kick-open of his entire world. The exhibition marks Teller’s most extensive solo presentation in Greece to date: two floors of work spanning more than forty years, staged in a former factory on the city’s industrial edge.

He once said, “I want to capture everything; tragedy and humour, beauty and absurdity.” In Athens, that ethos manifests physically. It’s not about subject; it’s about proximity. Teller’s world doesn’t separate glamour from decay. Everything lives side by side: Kate Moss in bed, Vivienne Westwood stripped bare, Agnès Varda holding her cat, Iggy Pop against a tree. There’s Pope Francis, a women’s prison, Victoria Beckham emerging from her own shopping bag, and Teller’s young daughter, Iggy, caught mid-laughter. All of it part of the same visual DNA: personal, political, ridiculous, and precise. The shock of the familiar meets the truth of the weird.

The opening gambit: “Symposium of Love” (2024-25), created with Dovile Drizyte, Teller’s wife and co-conspirator. The two appear naked on a Greek beach. Layered exposures. Bodies dissolving into one another. Around them: still life of fish guts, taxidermy, dead rabbits, and bleached rock. It’s visceral. Erotic. Repellent. A nod to Plato’s myth, the ancient narrative of humans torn in half and condemned to spend their lives searching for their other part. In Teller’s reading, this reunion isn’t redemptive; it’s flesh and friction. Love becomes less about connection than coexistence, the impossibility of two people fully merging and the beauty of trying anyway. It’s one of the show’s most arresting sequences, equal parts devotion and dissection. It’s intimate and cold. Beautiful and brutal.

Downstairs, the gallery becomes a chapel-echo. Teller turns part of the space into a pseudo-chapel, echoing the architecture of Catholic sanctuaries he photographed across Italy for Harper’s Bazaar Italia’s Jubilee edition. Mariacarla Boscono and Alex Consani appear frozen in prayer-like stillness, framed by gold and marble. Religious symbols mutate into fashion poses; grace meets fatigue. The scene feels reverent but slightly toxic, like faith filtered through contemporary image culture. In a built apse, a small video room screens Men (2023) — Teller and Alexander Skarsgård, half-naked and absurd, staggering through the Swedish snow. It’s a re-enactment of a story from Drizyte’s father’s past, but also a study of masculine endurance — tender and mocking at once. Teller’s sense of humour, that mix of slapstick and philosophy, cuts through everything.

Teller has never declared himself political, but politics lives under his skin. The section devoted to Katharine Hamnett’s protest T-shirts — “DISGUSTED TO BE BRITISH”, “BRING BACK GOD” feels pointed without preaching. His long friendships with Hamnett and Vivienne Westwood play out across the walls like fragments of a shared rebellion. When he talks about Brexit:“I’m an immigrant, and suddenly everything felt small, closed off” it registers as fatigue more than outrage. Teller’s form of resistance isn’t noise; it’s persistence. Keep photographing. Keep living. Keep laughing. That’s the rebellion. Born in Erlangen, postwar Germany, Teller learned early that pain is not the opposite of humour. His father’s suicide left a permanent imprint, a crack that became the entry point for everything else. His images, even at their funniest, carry that undertone: the absurd as a form of survival.

The choice of Athens isn’t incidental. That’s the mirror Teller found. Its creative landscape sits somewhere between exhaustion and ignition, a place of tension, noise, and fragile hope. Showing this work here, in a derelict factory with no pretension of neutrality, feels right. Teller doesn’t belong in clean white spaces; his photographs demand air, dust, conflict. Onassis Ready provides exactly that, an arena rather than a gallery. Walking through the space, the show feels less like an exhibition and more like a confrontation. Teller’s imagery doesn’t perform for you; it faces you down. There’s a physical honesty to it as if the walls themselves might start sweating. The factory space didn’t get the white cube treatment. Good. Doesn’t want it. The raw context suits him. The fractures in the building echo his own fractures: exile, loss, humour as armour. When Brexit hit, he says he felt the outsider slot tighten on him. He left Germany, landed in London. The camera then became his tribe. The shock of foreignness became his fuel.

The title comes from a church leaflet: you are invited. Simple, disarming, and totally Teller. It’s not an invitation in the polite sense. It’s a dare. Enter his world and risk discomfort. Look too closely and you might recognize yourself in the distortion. What you are invited ultimately reveals is how consistent Teller has remained, not in aesthetic, but in attitude. His work has always rejected perfection. It exists somewhere between instinct and accident, clarity and collapse. He photographs like a person thinking out loud. Four decades on, that honesty still cuts through the noise. Teller’s vision remains disarmingly direct. In Athens, it feels newly relevant: human, messy, and defiantly alive.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s continuation.
And the invitation stands.