Araki Teller, Teller Araki

At the initiative of Ostlicht Gallery and Peter Coeln in Vienna, the exhibition ARAKI TELLER TELLER ARAKI brings together two of the most important photographers of our times, showing new works conceived for this joint exhibition and entering into an artistic dialogue. Nobuyoshi Araki and Juergen Teller are united in their radical artistic attitude and their almost insatiable hunger for images as reflections of their personal experience of the world.

With his bondage-photographs Nobuyoshi Araki (*1940 in Tokyo) developed a unique visual handwriting, creating a poetic as well as provocative portrayal of human passion which points beyond Japanese culture. Araki invented the concept of the “photographic ego”, signifying the intriguing interplay between fiction, fact and desire.

Araki shows works from the project he has been pursuing since 2012: “Last by Leica”. This is a kind of visual diary in which he draws his photographic impressions and ideas together into a touching commentary on his life, artistic work and working method. Young women, proliferating Japanese urban landscapes, rifts in cloud configurations – these all point to his life themes. Photographed with a Leica M7 – the last analogous camera produced by Leica – Araki completes with “Last by Leica” his Leica-series that he began in the 1980s with “Life by Leica” and continued in 2000 with “Love by Leica”. Like Araki also Juergen Teller (*1964 in Erlangen) deals in a sustained way with existential questions of physicality and sexuality. During the 1990s he revolutionized art and fashion photography with distinctive images dealing with the fragmentary identities and surfaces of the fashion world and models. His works satirizes our society’s cult of beauty, testing how close the photograph can depict reality.

Juergen Teller will juxtapose a new complex of works entitled “Woo!” with Araki’s “Last of Leica” series. For his London show with the same, he covered the walls of the gallery with proof pages relating to his commercial photography and pictures from his twenty-year spanning career. This resulted in an in a huge photo collage on site with unforeseen relationships across time, which Teller then photographically reassessed as a form of self-reflection and deconstruction. Many of these images will now be shown in Vienna as prints for the first time.