News & Opinion - Art in America

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Q+A: Juergen Teller Brings the Louvre to Berlin

With a camera in both hands, Juergen Teller has descended upon Berlin with a show at the Johann König gallery featuring images of Raquel Zimmerman and Charlotte Rampling at the Louvre. Previously on view at Lehmann Maupin in New York, this traveling show is matched by a unique show at biannual journal 032c's exhibition space. For the latter he's presenting new works in a glass vitrine, featuring his son, Vivienne Westwood and William Eggleston going through the sexual motions.

STEPHEN RIOLO: You occupy two very auratic roles—that of the male fashion photographer, and the artist. How do you as master of the situation fit into your photographs, particularly in your book of self-portraits, Louis XV (2005), featuring Charlotte Rampling?

JUERGEN TELLER: From the beginning it was clear that we were doing a project that was going to end up as an exhibition or a book. The whole shoot took half a year but some people look at the series and tell me, "Oh my god you must have had one crazy weekend!" It was one very carefully planned. I also wanted to change my physical appearance during the shoot. So if you look closely, at the beginning I'm relatively skinny and by the end of the book I've put on seven kilos. I wanted to look flamboyant, rich and fat. I wanted to have tons of caviar, huge amounts of caviar in this huge hotel room. And I thought, easy I'm just going to put on this weight now and it will be easy to take it off... but it wasn't!
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Adrian Ghenie, Pie Eater

by Stephen Riolo 10/26/10

With a 2006 group exhibition, "Cluj Connection," at Haunch of Venison in Zurich, British critic and curator Jane Neal drew a handful of young artists out of the bleak Transylvania arts scene and cast them into international limelight. Highlighting this exhibition was a figurative painter named Adrian Ghenie, whose dark compositions of urban architecture and shadowy figures, won him a solo exhibition Shadow of a Daydream at Haunch of Venison Zurich in 2007. Four years later, the 33-year-old Ghenie is London-based and preparing for a solo presentation at SMAK Ghent which opens this December. Ghenie's virtuosic figurative painting has grown to hold court with works from the New Leipziger Schule or New British movements of contemporary painting. For his solo show, "The Hunted" at Nolan Judin Berlin, Ghenie has created a new body of work brighter in tone but decidedly darker in content.
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Enter the Fold: Katja Strunz

by Stephen Riolo 8/17/10

Berlin-based artist Katja Strunz tantalizes viewers with her adaptations of modernist forms—dangling abstract geometries in configurations on the wall, or subtly altering found examples of Twentieth Century design. Strunz's paper plane-like metal metal works zoom across walls, but the artist's interests ultimately exceed the gallery, and the history of the square she's crumpling. One recent show has seen the artist's first sustained effort at outdoor work, and without any literal architecture to deconstruct. On the eve of Strunz's forthcoming solo show, opening September 3 in Cologne, she discusses the secret histories folded into her materials.

STEPHEN RIOLO: "Im Geviert" the title of your current solo show at the Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken, calls up thoughts of Heidegger, an ordering of form and nature.

KATJA STRUNZ: The concept for the show came from the fact that I was asked to do outdoor sculptures. I normally work with interior room structures. My last show in Berlin, at Contemporary Fine Arts, was called Einbruchstellen ("Points of Rupture"). Although these works were abstract in form they had a concrete relationship to interior spaces, like cracks in a wall or pieces of broken plaster falling from the ceiling. The whole show had to do with objects breaking in from the outside and a lot to do with decay.
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