Juergen Teller: Enjoy Your Life!

“In the wider sense, everything is a kind of self-portrait. It’s just the way you see things and how certain things rouse your curiosity and get you all excited.“
–Juergen Teller
 

Until mid-March Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague presents a unique author installation of the most recent works by Juergen Teller, one of the most sought after contemporary photographers. He came to fame 25 years ago in 1991 when he photographed the band Nirvana, and his iconic pictures of Kurt Cobain were published in Details magazine. Since then his pictures have straddled the interface of art and commercial photography. His stylistic device of choice is the portrait. Working in the areas of music, fashion and celebrities as well as everyday scenes and landscape, he draws on his intuitive feel for people, situations, milieus and cliches to create images of great immediacy and deceptive simplicity. Defying expectations, Teller’s pictures do not idealise or romanticise, but aim for the very core of the subject, foregrounding the concept of an imperfect beauty. In this respect, Teller expects his sitters to let go of their inhibitions and embrace a raw and unvarnished authenticity. The resulting images—now more than ever—are baffling, unpredictable, intimate, seemingly transgressive, but never compromising, since they are informed by a deep empathy and sensitivity.

Enjoy Your Life! is an author project, created by the artist, which features older series such as Nürnberg (2005), together with more recent projects such as Kanye, Juergen and Kim (2015) and Charlotte Rampling, Fox and Plate (Teller) (2016). Other works are more autobiographical and occasionally anecdotal such as the unsparingly candid images of himself in The Clinic (2015) and subjective documentations of his engagement with his youth and his German origins such as Irene im Wald (2012). The latest series, Mit dem Teller nach Bonn and Plates/Teller (2016), seem to bring together and concentrate all his earlier themes and compositions. The protagonists’ games with a plate—the German word for plate is “Teller,” and so the plate acts as a synonym and stand-in for the photographer—are captured in compositions that are as tender as they are exuberant, direct and honest, full of humor and strangely touching.

The exhibition Enjoy Your Life! is a co-production by Galerie Rudolfinum with Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. For each of the venues, Teller has adapted the exhibition according to the individual gallery locations. Galerie Rudolfinum will present the largest selection of photographs together with a selection of video works. A collective catalogue featuring reproductions of the exhibited works was published for all institutions and includes written contributions by prominent curators, publishers and editors, as well as candid texts by the artist himself.

Juergen Teller (*1964) grew up in Bubenreuth near Erlangen, Germany. The scion of a violin-making family, he began an apprenticeship as a bow maker, but abandoned it in 1984 when he enrolled at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie (Bavarian State School of Photography). Teller was the recipient of the Citibank Photography Prize in association with the Photographer’s Gallery, London in 2003. His work is featured in numerous collections around the world, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; International Center for Photography, New York; Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. He has published forty-one artist books and exhibition catalogues since 1996. He currently holds a Professorship of Photography at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg. Teller lives and works in London.