Carlier | Gebauer, Berlin
08.11.2014 - 24.01.2015
carlier | gebauer is very pleased to announce the European premiere of new works by photographer Paul Graham, opening November 7th, 2014 from 6-9pm. Does Yellow Run Forever? is Graham´s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Violet bedding swathes a sleeping woman, her arm poised in a gentle arc across her brow. A double rainbow emerges from a verdant field. Dark clouds hover above a pawn shop where luminous rays of light cut through the clouds to illuminate their readiness to buy gold. Variations of these three motifs comprise Paul Graham´s latest body of work: pieces of rainbows arcing across the Irish landscape, crude gold-pawn shops dotting the streets of New York, and tender images of a woman (his partner) asleep in bare-walled rooms, to reveal bittersweet dreams of desire deferred and the promise of happiness that might be found, if we only knew where to look.
© Paul Graham, ‘Pawn Shop, Ozone Park, New York, 2013
© Does Yellow Run Forever?, 2014, exhibition view at Carlier | Gebauer
Does Yellow Run Forever? takes Graham´s nuanced approach to the ephemeral and quotidian, introduced with ‘a shimmer of possibility’ and ‘The Present’ but shifts it from the scale of the social to a more personal and emotive context. Large colour photographs taken between 2011 and 2014, hang with expansive breadth at varying heights from neck snapping to just off the floor. Shamelessly embracing the cliché of photographing a rainbow, or one’s lover, these poetic juxtapositions articulate an exploration of desire and hope: the breadth of our
dreams, the narrow aspirations of chasing only wealth, and the enchantment found at the rainbow’s end. Dreams, love, hope, wealth, magic and reality collide in the alchemy formed by these three simple elements: the air becomes gold, our dreams become visible, and wealth becomes worthless.
© Paul Graham, ‘Senami’, Auckland, NZ (grey room), 2011
Graham established his reputation through colour photographs of exurban cityscapes in contemporary Britain. Early series like “A1—The Great North Road” (1981-82), “Beyond Caring (1984-85),” and “Troubled Land,” (1984-86), exemplified his interest in locating traces of history within the everyday. These concerns informed the artist‘s later projects in Northern Ireland, in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in Japan, and for the past 12 years, in the United States.
On the occasion of this exhibition, Graham has produced a unique small format book, published in collaboration with MACK.
© Paul Graham, ‘Co Clare, Ireland, 2014
Paul Graham was born in 1956 in England and lives and works in New York. He has been awarded the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography 2012, the most prestigious international award for photography. His work has been the subject of more than eighty solo exhibitions in internationally renowned institutions including the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate Gallery, London. Paul Grahamʼs work is included in such important public collections as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Arts Council England, the V&A Museum and the National Museum of Photography, London; the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany; and the Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, as well as in significant private collections worldwide.