| For his fourth exhibition at New York’s Lehmann Maupin Gallery, photographer Juergen Teller presented his recent body of work entitled Ukraine. Along with four other artists, Teller was commissioned by the PinchukArtCentre to interpret the country for the 52nd International Venice Biennale 2007, where a selection from this series was first shown. The New York exhibition marked the first time an expanded version of the series, along with Teller’s other new works, was shown in the United States. Faced with the question of how to depict modern Ukraine, a country that normally shows up as a marginal blip in the Western radar, Teller chose to use its capital city as a setting for a W Magazine fashion shoot. | 
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Juergen Teller traveled to the former Soviet bloc country to document its new capitalist yearnings before bringing it all back home.
For his fourth exhibition at New York’s Lehmann Maupin Gallery, photographer Juergen Teller presented his recent body of work entitled Ukraine. Along with four other artists, Teller was commissioned by the PinchukArtCentre to interpret the country for the 52nd International Venice Biennale 2007, where a selection from this series was first shown. The New York exhibition marked the first time an expanded version of the series, along with Teller’s other new works, was shown in the United States.
Faced with the question of how to depict modern Ukraine, a country that normally shows up as a marginal blip in the Western radar, Teller chose to use its capital city as a setting for a W Magazine fashion shoot. His characteristic mixture of high fashion shots, street scenes of the city, and portraits of ordinary people served as a way of representing his own impressions of a country marked by a brash, youthful energy and a frenzied obsession with capitalism. In Teller’s Kiev, the membrane between harsh economic reality and obtainable fantasy is surprisingly thin. These pictures represent a place where beautiful girls are waiting to be discovered and where the desire for luxury has reached a fever pitch.
Teller’s photographs, whether presented in books, magazines, or exhibitions, are marked by his refusal to separate his fashion photography from his mostly autobiographical, non-commissioned images. Expanded from both the printed pages of W and the Venice exhibition, the Ukraine show at Lehmann Maupin demonstrated the same refusal to separate Teller’s public, commercial side from his private, domestic one. Teller exhibited photographs from recent campaigns for Vivienne Westwood and Marc Jacobs, including portraits of Victoria Beckham, Harmony Korine, and an exuberant shot of Jacobs himself, alongside photographs of his own children. The resulting show was a multinational assembly that paid equal respects to the glamorous and the mundane, where celebrity and family mingled on the same walls.
