Juergen Teller at the Art and Exhibition Hall
Juergen Teller is one of the world’s most sought-after photographers. His works are now on display at the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn.
“Everything is in the broadest sense a kind of self-portrait. It’s simply the way you see things and how certain things make you curious and excite you”, says the photographer Juergen Teller. Not for nothing has he set the portrait as a stylistic device at the centre of his photographic work. His pictures move at the interface of art and commercial photography and convey the sense of a certain casualness, but at the same time show themselves to be balanced compositions and carefully conceived.
Born in 1964 in southern Germany, Teller has lived in London since the 1980s, where he began to take photographs for music, zeitgeist and fashion magazines. In 1991 he photographed the band Nirvana and his photographs of Kurt Cobain made Teller known to a wide public. In the foreground of his pictures there is often the visualization of an imperfect beauty.
Perplexing visual relationships
In fashion campaigns for prestigious labels, for example, Teller sets actors, models, pop stars and other celebrities in sometimes perplexing visual relationships. This artistic principle he has transferred to his non-commercial work. “The visual results are bewildering, unexpected, cliché-negating, intimate, seemingly transgressive and very direct, but not compromising, for great empathy and sensitivity are his hallmarks”, says the website of the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn, where an exhibition of Teller’s work is on display until September.
Works such as Siegerflieger (i.e. Aviator Victor) and My Man Crush, Pep Guardiola transform the Exhibition Hall foyer into a public viewing about victories and losses. Other groups of works are autobiographical or anecdotal: quiet landscapes from Nuremberg, candid, unsparing images of himself such as The Clinic and subjective confrontations with his youth and homeland such as Irene im Wald (i.e. Irene in the Forest).His latest series, Mit dem Teller nach Bonn (i.e. With Teller to Bonn) and Plates/Teller, bring together and concentrate all his earlier themes.
Juergen Teller: Enjoy Your Life, 10 June to 25 September 2016 at the Art and Exhibition Hall in Bonn
