carlier | gebauer, Berlin, is pleased to announce Verdigris, Paul Graham’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.

Verdigris, the green oxidation that forms on weathered copper, marks the culmination of a twelve-year sequence of works by Paul Graham exploring the transience of life and the inevitability of mortality. This exhibition completes a loose trilogy of works that began with Does Yellow Run Forever? 2010-14, which captured intimate moments with his partner, framed by Irish rainbows and gold shops, followed by Mother from 2018-19, a poignant and tender series documenting his mother in her final year. Verdigris brings this progression full circle, juxtaposing images of people gazing into the horizon with ethereal photographs of cherry blossoms—symbols of fleeting beauty and the passage of time.

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 photos were taken in a New Jersey park where Graham 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.

There will be a book launch and artist talk on Saturday, 18 January 2025, at 4pm, on the occasion of Paul Graham’s new book Verdigris / Ambergris, published by MACK.