Juergen Teller: you are invited

Juergen Teller inaugurates Onassis Ready with a landmark exhibition, marking his largest solo show in Greece to date.

Honest, tender, yet always unpredictable—Juergen Teller has famously bridged fashion with contemporary art, establishing his own unique subversive style within popular culture. From October 19 to December 30, Onassis Stegi invites you to Juergen Teller’s most extensive solo exhibition to date in Greece, you are invited, at Onassis Ready, the Onassis Foundation’s new space in Athens. 

Including iconic images (such as his portraits of Iggy Pop, Kate Moss and Charlotte Rampling), still-lifes and family portraits, this 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.

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”.

The 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. you are invited opens up a space for dialogue between Teller’s emotionally charged universe and the contemporary realities of Greece, inviting a compelling encounter between the local and the global.  

Onassis Ready: a site of experimentation, radical ideas, and dialogue between art and technology
you are invited will be presented in Athens, Greece, 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. 

An exhibition curated by Juergen Teller and Dovile Drizyte, realized through the commission and production of Onassis Stegi.