Bring Back God / Bring Back Juergen Teller

JUERGEN TELLER “you are invited” | Onassis Ready, Athens | Until 30 Dec 2025

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.


Bring Back God / Bring Back Juergen Teller

Juergen Teller — “you are invited”
On view at Onassis Ready, Athens
Until 30 December 2025

Credits

Words:  Elena Murratzu / @elena.marratzu

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