The Photographer Inaugurates The Onassis Foundation’s New Creative Hub With A Career-Spanning Exhibition That Turns Invitation Into Revelation
by Kenneth Richard
Juergen Teller has never been interested in perfection. His work has always lived somewhere between the beautiful and the brutally human — the unguarded moment, the slant of light that reveals rather than flatters, the vulnerability that sits beneath the image. And so it feels fitting that he is the one to open Onassis Ready, the Onassis Foundation’s new creative space in Athens. His exhibition, titled you are invited, is both an unveiling and a provocation — a call to look, to feel, and to belong.
Housed in a restored plastics factory in the city’s Agios Ioannis Rentis district, Onassis Ready is Athens’ newest cultural outpost: 3,760 square meters of raw concrete, light, and ambition. The Juergen Teller exhibit, with design by architect Tom Emerson and 6a Architects, retains its industrial soul — exposed ducts, visible seams, and a sense of perpetual incompletion. It feels alive, responsive, and somehow still in motion, which makes it a near-perfect container for Teller’s particular form of imperfection. On the opening night, as visitors drifted through its vast corridors, the energy was both reverent and restless — as though something important was beginning.
Teller’s exhibition is described as a mid-career survey, though it feels more like an open diary written across decades. The walls are lined with his photographs: a succession of portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and fragments that move seamlessly between the sacred and the profane. There are the now-iconic images of Kate Moss, Charlotte Rampling, and Iggy Pop, their immediacy undimmed by time; there are quiet studies of light, family, and faith; and there are new, unpublished works made over the last few years that shift the tone toward something deeper — not darker, but more inward-looking.
The exhibition’s title, you are invited, feels casual at first glance, but it is a deceptively generous statement. It invites not only the viewer but the city, the moment, the mess of life itself. Teller has always sought to dissolve the boundary between artist and subject, between the seen and the unseen. Here, that impulse becomes almost spiritual. His photographs no longer just capture people; they hold them. They feel less like confrontations and more like confessions.
Over the past eight years, Teller’s work has grown increasingly personal, shaped by his collaboration with his wife, Dovile Drizyte, who also co-curated the exhibition. Together, the two have created a visual language of intimacy — at times humorous, at times grotesque, always unflinchingly human. Their shared projects chronicle love, partnership, and the arrival of their daughter with a disarming mixture of playfulness and gravity. In these images, Teller’s eye — once so attuned to the theatricality of fashion — turns tenderly toward the domestic and the divine. The result is a portrait of an artist transformed, not by fame or career, but by life itself.
That transformation runs throughout the exhibition. Alongside the personal works are Teller’s recent public commissions, including his remarkable portraits of Pope Francis inside a women’s prison during the 2024 Venice Biennale, and his stark documentation of Auschwitz on the eightieth anniversary of its liberation earlier this year. These projects, in their emotional weight and ethical complexity, mark a new chapter for Teller. The irreverent chronicler of modern celebrity is still present, but now tempered by reflection — by a sense that photography can serve as witness, not spectacle.
Walking through the exhibition, the viewer feels this shift physically. The images are printed large and hung in long, rhythmic rows, each one catching light differently. In one sequence, models stand in cathedrals and modernist churches, their clothes glinting against marble and stone; in another, family portraits are punctuated by quiet landscapes and still lifes, an echo of both love and loss. The installation’s center is a dark, monolithic structure housing video works — moving pieces that expand the emotional register from irony to intimacy. Everywhere there is the sense of dialogue: between art and life, between public and private, between the artist and the city that now holds his work.
Athens proves to be an inspired setting. Teller’s aesthetic — with its raw edges and refusal of glamour — finds kinship in a city defined by tension and transformation. The streets outside Onassis Ready pulse with energy, graffiti, construction dust, and light; inside, that same energy becomes visual rhythm. The photographs feel part of the city’s texture, not apart from it. For the Onassis Foundation, choosing Teller as the first artist to inaugurate this new space feels deliberate — a declaration that the future of culture lies in contradiction, in work that is both intimate and expansive, ancient and immediate, deeply human.
Afroditi Panagiotakou, the Onassis Foundation’s Artistic Director, describes the exhibition as a beginning: “We’re opening the doors of our new venue with 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. Juergen Teller’s show will be more than an exhibition. It’s an invitation: to feel, to question, to belong.”
Her words ring true within the space. Teller’s photographs resist easy classification — fashion, art, document — yet they all operate on the same emotional wavelength. Whether he is capturing a celebrity in mid-laughter or his daughter asleep on a kitchen floor, the impulse is the same: to record something honest before it disappears. There’s humor, too — wry, awkward, sometimes absurd — but even that feels like a form of tenderness. Teller has always used humor to humanize, not to mock. His work invites empathy without sentimentality, intimacy without intrusion.
And then there’s that unmistakable lightness — not aesthetic but existential. Despite the weight of some subjects, the show carries an undercurrent of hope. Teller’s gaze, once rebellious and confrontational, now seems guided by curiosity, even faith. Not religious faith necessarily, but a belief in the act of seeing, in the redemptive possibility of paying attention. In this way, you are invited reads like a meditation on photography itself — on what it means to bear witness to a world both flawed and full.
For Onassis Ready, Teller’s exhibition sets the tone for what the institution aims to become: a platform for artists who blur boundaries between disciplines and defy conventional hierarchies. The space is designed not as a gallery but as a laboratory — a place where artists can test, fail, and reimagine. It also serves as the Athens base for Onassis ONX, the Foundation’s international program supporting experimentation across art, technology, and performance. The choice to open with Teller — whose work has long rejected separation between art and life — feels almost poetic.
As the evening light falls through the skylights and the crowd disperses, the photographs remain — steady, unsentimental, quietly luminous. Teller’s images, printed large and hung with precision, seem to hum against the pale walls. There is no spectacle, no grand finale — just presence. You are invited, the title insists. Not commanded, not instructed. Invited.
And perhaps that’s the point. Teller’s invitation is not just to enter the exhibition, but to inhabit its questions: How do we see others? How do we see ourselves? What does honesty look like when everything is performative? The answers are not given, only suggested — in a glance, a shadow, a gesture.
In the end, you are invited is less a retrospective than a reintroduction. It shows Teller as both witness and participant, provocateur and poet, a man still finding new ways to see. It shows Athens as a city ready to host the complexity of contemporary art without diluting its own soul. And it shows Onassis Ready as something rare in today’s cultural landscape — a space that listens, adapts, and dares.
Here, in a city that knows how to balance ruin and renewal, Teller’s invitation feels less like an opening and more like a return — to honesty, to wonder, to the simple courage of being seen.