Photographer Juergen Teller will present his recent body of work Ukraine, for his fourth exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery. Teller was commissioned, along with four other artists, by the PinchukArtCentre to interpret the Ukraine for the 52nd International Venice Biennale 2007, where a selection from this series was first shown. This exhibition marks the first time, an expanded version, along with other new works, will be shown in the United States.

Faced with how to experience and discover the Ukraine, Teller chose to employ the city as a setting for a W Magazine fashion shoot, characteristically mixing fashion, still-lives of the city, and portraits of ordinary people as a way of representing his own fantasy of a country marked by a brash youthful energy and an obsession with capitalism. In Teller’s Kiev the membrane between harsh economic reality and obtainable fantasy is surprisingly thin and these pictures represent a place where beautiful girls wait to be discovered in a place where the desire for luxury has reached a fever pitch.