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. 

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.