Irish artist Patrick Graham and Northern Irish artist Cathy Wilkes are the recipients of the inaugural Francis Bacon Awards for Irish Visual Arts program.
Graham is being awarded the Francis Bacon Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to Irish painting and influence on contemporary visual art over more than six decades, while Wilkes is receiving the Francis Bacon Mid-Career Artist Award, nodding to her multihyphenated practice of sculpture, painting, drawing and installation. The €40,000 ($44,800) prize fund is being split, Graham will receive €25,000 and €15,000 for Wilkes.
Both artists will be awarded during Dublin Gallery Weekend 2026, taking place from November 5 through to 8. The award program has been supported by Château La Coste and the law firm Addleshaw Goddard. Graham and Wilkes will be invited to stage solo exhibitions at Château La Coste in Provence, France as part of the award.
In choosing the recipients of the award, an international judging panel was established with Emma Goltz, chair of Studio Voltaire in London; Barbara Dawson, director of Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin; Brian Cass, head of the Hayward Touring Gallery at the Hayward Gallery; Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, writer, critic and educator, and Mary McCarthy, director of Crawford Art Gallery in Cork.
The judging panel praised Graham for the resurgence of figurative painting during the 1980s and that his most powerful work combined “visceral renderings of the mortal body with dispersed fragments of plaintive text – confronting cultural trauma, religious repression and existential angst.” Wilkes’ work was lauded for its “bruised beauty and fragile grace” and the use of “everyday materials” in her practice.
To commemorate the Dublin Gallery Weekend 2026, the podcast Talk Art, hosted by Robert Diament and Russell Tovey, will be recording live from the National Gallery of Ireland on November 7 with Graham to discuss his influence on contemporary Irish painting and his six-decade career.