The new Athens is not the ancient Athens. Gone are the whispers of marble gods and their sun-scorched ruins. Instead, in Agios Ioannis Rentis – a former plastics factory now polished into something raw, muscular and gleaming – we find Onassis Ready: the newest cultural playground where the industrial collides with the poetic. And who better to christen its concrete halls than Juergen Teller, the man who has turned a peach, a Pope and a naked Kate Moss into mythic icons of our time?

From October 19 to December 30, Teller’s retrospective You Are Invited floods the factory-turned-gallery with his most piercing visual confessions to date. Part mid-career survey, part fever dream, the show is less about looking back than about fusing past with present – Kate Moss lolling languidly in the ‘90s meets Pope Francis in a Venetian women’s prison circa 2024. It is as if Teller has arranged a dinner party between his ghosts and his revelations, seating Iggy Pop next to Charlotte Rampling, serving peaches alongside snails and pouring wine until everyone confesses.

And yes, we are very much invited.

The exhibition unfolds like an intimate scrapbook blown up to extreme proportions, piecing together the decades of Teller’s oeuvre – from unflinching self-portraits to family tableaux with his wife, Dovile Drizyte, and their daughter, to still-lifes that make fruit rot deliciously before our eyes. Here, humour jostles with horror; the grotesque with tenderness. His camera doesn’t simply capture – it interrogates. The result is a gallery of images that ask, “What do you fear?” and in the same breath, “What do you desire?”

Far more than a feat of nostalgia, the newer works, especially those forged in his crucible of recent commissions, bear a fresh solemnity. The Pope shot against prison walls, Auschwitz reframed for its 80th liberation anniversary – these are not casual images, but weighted offerings. Teller, it seems, has peeled away even more of his protective skin, confronting the brutality of history while holding onto a sliver of absurd joy.

Onassis Ready, with its 3,760 square metres of unapologetic space, mirrors this duality. Designed by Tom Emerson of 6a Architects, the venue still carries the bones of its factory life – pipes, beams, concrete floors – but now thrums with possibility. A home for experimental, boundary-defying work, it positions Athens shoulder-to-shoulder with New York through its Onassis ONX program, where post-digital worlds meet deeply human stories. For Teller, whose practice has always blurred the line between private diary and global statement, it is the perfect stage.

Afroditi Panagiotakou, artistic director of the Onassis Foundation, puts it best: “This is where it begins.” With You Are Invited, she says, art becomes “where the political clashes with the intimate, where raw, unfiltered emotion meets the quiet strength of family.”

And isn’t that Teller’s legacy? To turn the grotesque into gospel, to insist that vulnerability is a form of power, to take us by the hand and drag us – sometimes laughing, sometimes gasping – into the messy, glittering heart of life.

The factory doors are open. The invitation has been sent. And inside, the best of Juergen Teller awaits. Discover the exhibition here.

Photography by Juergen Teller.

@juergenteller_

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