carlier | gebauer, Madrid, is delighted to announce Verdigris, Paul Graham’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Madrid, part of the Festival OFF of PHotoEspaña 2025.
After his recent presentation at the gallery in Berlin earlier this year, Verdigris presents Graham’s latest body of work and celebrates his return to Madrid after more than 20 years, marking a significant moment since his institutional solo exhibition at Fundación Telefónica during PHotoEspaña in 2004.
Verdigris, the green oxidation that forms on weathered copper, is the culmination of a twelve-year sequence of works by Paul Graham exploring the transience of life and the inevitability of mortality. In Verdigris, Graham explores life’s impermanence through portraits of individuals gazing thoughtfully at the horizon, aware of time passing. These portraits are paired with images of cherry blossoms. However, the blossoms in Graham’s photographs are distorted, corrupted by the digital camera’s failure to capture their motion in the wind.
Using an ultra-resolution mode, Graham’s camera creates a series of “failed” images, which, despite their flaws, convey a unique beauty and serve as a metaphor for the intersection of nature, technology, and transience. All the photographs were taken in a public park in New Jersey where the artist has worked for seven years, a place offering a panoramic view of the post-industrial landscape, with Newark and its airport in the distance. Visitors often pause to contemplate this vast horizon, regardless of the season.
Through Verdigris, Graham invites us to reflect on the fragility of life, our reliance on technology in failing to capture its wondrous beauty, and the delicate tension between preservation and decay. In this series, we are reminded that the more we attempt to preserve or control our surroundings, the more we encounter the inadequacy of our attempts—beautiful failures as they may be—like the oxidation of copper or the corrupted images of the blossoms, time and life inexorably rolls forward, regardless of our desire to hold onto it. Graham embraces all these images as echoes of our brief time on earth, where the distant horizon beckons and the sun will always set. Beauty is transient and the depredations of time are inevitable, yet precious life has a wonder and beauty, however brief, that we should embrace to the full.