If you haven’t seen the Paradis exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, maybe you should. Not because it’s good, but because it’s Juergen Teller. Who could clarify which fashion shoots make it into magazines and which into gallery spaces? Juergen Teller’s Paradis, a story of two naked women of different ages in the Louvre, does the latter. A fashion story becomes an art exhibition. Why?

Of course, Juergen does it right. It’s all his angles, colors, crops. We find two recognizable women – Rachel Zimmerman and Charlotte Rampling – dressed down to nothing and placed in the empty Louvre, next to Roman statues and Classical paintings. I appreciated the raw feeling of it: women’s bodies do feel more statuesque in the context of the museum, as if the bodies themselves should be put behind glass and on pedestals. The women become showpieces, blending into the quiet world of description cards and checkered floors.  

On the other hand, the live real flesh, put between the naked marble history heroes, heightens the juxtaposition between the past and the vibrant present. A human body in between the relics of art, the jewels from the past – is it a visitor, an alien, nobody, dust? Greek body perfection meets the flesh of today. Hundreds of years of admiration meets the It of the moment.

The nakedness becomes all too obvious in the empty museum space, especially knowing that Juergen Teller was commissioned for a “fashion shoot” here for French men’s magazine Paradis. Fashion without clothes in a museum environment? I like this shift. I also like the picture of Rachel Zimmerman’s torso, all flat from the flashlight, standing in front of the statues. Juergen Teller photographs some of the museum’s pieces by themselves, like the sculpture of a man holding a cut-open cow and the painting of a coronation. These pictures blend together with the images of the women, creating a complete package of an extraordinary visit to the Louvre.

Paradis is at Lehmann Maupin (540 W. 26th st) until October 17th. Images from Lehmann Maupin’s website.