Patrick Graham and Cathy Wilkes Win Inaugural Francis Bacon Awards

Irish painter Patrick Graham and Northern Irish artist Cathy Wilkes will share a €40,000 ($44,800) prize fund as the first recipients of the Francis Bacon Awards for Irish Visual Arts. Graham takes the Francis Bacon Lifetime Achievement Award and €25,000; Wilkes receives the Francis Bacon Mid-Career Artist Award and €15,000.

Both awards will be presented during Dublin Gallery Weekend 2026, which runs November 5–8. The program has backing from Château La Coste, the art estate in Provence, and the law firm Addershaw Goddard's legal counterpart in the announcement, Addleshaw Goddard. As part of the prize, Graham and Wilkes will each stage a solo exhibition at Château La Coste in Provence, France.

Who are the winners?

Graham, born in Ireland, has spent more than six decades contributing to Irish painting and shaping contemporary visual art. The judges credited him with the resurgence of figurative painting (art representing the human figure) during the 1980s. In their citation, they said 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 works across sculpture, painting, drawing and installation. The panel praised her work's "bruised beauty and fragile grace" and her use of "everyday materials" — a practice that turns modest, domestic objects into quietly charged compositions.

Who picked them?

An international judging panel selected both recipients. It included:

• Emma Goltz, chair of Studio Voltaire in London
• Barbara Dawson, director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin
• Brian Cass, head of Hayward Touring Gallery at the Hayward Gallery
• Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, writer, critic and educator
• Mary McCarthy, director of the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork

The mix of London and Irish institutions signals the award's stated ambition: to place Irish visual artists within an international frame, not only a national one.

What does this change for Irish artists?

In practical terms, the awards add a new, moneyed prize to a field where such recognition has been scarce. The combined €40,000 fund, the Château La Coste exhibition invitation and the Dublin Gallery Weekend platform give both winners money and visibility at once. For younger Irish artists, the existence of a dedicated mid-career award — Wilkes's category — also creates a concrete benchmark to aim for.

The timing matters too. Dublin Gallery Weekend 2026 will put the ceremonies in front of collectors, curators and critics already in the city for the fair-style programming of November 5–8.

A live podcast with Graham

To mark the weekend, the podcast Talk Art, hosted by Robert Diament and actor Russell Tovey, will record live from the National Gallery of Ireland on November 7. Graham will join them to discuss his influence on contemporary Irish painting and his six-decade career — a rare public conversation with a painter the judges describe as central to the figure's return in Irish art.

If the inaugural edition sets the pattern, the Francis Bacon Awards could become a fixed stop on the Irish art calendar: prize money, a French exhibition and a live broadcast, all in one November weekend.