Juergen Teller ‘i need to live’
The largest Juergen Teller exhibition oscillates between intimacy and humor at the Milan Triennale. It is the largest-ever survey show on Teller’s work, covering his creative output from the first half of the 1990s to the present day.
image © ModificaDelfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio, courtesy Triennale Milano
Who’s Juergen Teller?
Juergen Teller studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich before moving to London in 1986. Working across different genres of photography, Teller has shot fashion campaigns for numerous luxury brands, as well as editorials for prominent art and fashion publications. In 2003, Teller was awarded the Citibank Prize for Photography by the Photographers' Gallery, London, and in 2018, he received the Special Presentation Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography, New York.
“i need to live”
Joining forces with Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello and Juergen Teller, "i need to live" compiles over 1,000 works, bringing together both personal and commissioned projects, recognizable images, and new photographic series as well as videos and installations.
image © ModificaDelfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio, courtesy Triennale Milano
"i need to live" represents Teller’s reaction to existential incidents which have shaped his life, sometimes in tragic ways. The artist addresses these topics in the same manner as he practices his photography: in a straightforward, realistic style, which is completely his own. With unique imagery, the German photographer celebrates the value of being alive while acknowledging the fragility of human existence.
Legs, Saint Laurent Spring Summer 2019 campaign, Lake Como, Italy 2018. Juergen Teller “i need to live” © Triennale Milano
The exhibition is curated by Thomas Weski in collaboration with Teller and his wife and creative partner, Dovile Drizyte. Teller's unique and distorted perspective has shaped the showcase, which celebrates the beauty and fragility of life. "I need to live" explores Teller's artistic evolution from the early 1990s, spanning photography to videos and installations, and includes a photographic series created specifically for the exhibition.
Juergen Teller “i need to live” © Triennale Milano
There is also a series in which Teller and Drizyte explore their relationship, marriage, and parenthood, "defined by a characteristic mix of serious and intimate but often humorous characters created in a grotesque style," says Stefano Boeri, president of the Milan Triennale. The exhibition reveals the details of portraits of personalities from the world of entertainment and culture, from Joan Didion to Steve McQueen, Kate Moss, Vivienne Westwood, Björk, and Agnès Varda, through photographic series that offer glimpses of the artist’s private life, with its infinite facets of pain, humor, romance, and irony.
Often described as provocative and irreverent, Teller’s photographs reveal a desire to dismantle any rhetorical superstructure and to immortalize his subjects directly, exposing them, sometimes literally, with brutal honesty, placing them all on the same level, that of a passionate, fragile, and sometimes grotesque humanity. Famous personalities seem familiar, and the photographs on display seem to constitute a kind of family album of the artist, in which the personal and the professional tend to converge but do not overlap.
image © ModificaDelfino Sisto Legnani – DSL Studio, courtesy Triennale Milano
It is no coincidence that the three largest rooms in the exhibition are dedicated to the artist’s private life, as in the two rooms at the end of the corridor that house the series "The Myth," which Teller describes as his most romantic project. In this series, his wife Dovile Drizyte is photographed in the rooms of the Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio with her legs up (a position that, according to fertility legends, should increase the chances of conception), and the works celebrating the birth of their daughter Iggy are presented to the public in the last large room with the tenderness of a newborn, named after one of the world’s greatest rock stars.
