Irish artist Patrick Graham and Northern Irish artist Cathy Wilkes are the first recipients of the Francis Bacon Awards for Irish Visual Arts, a new prize program launched this year. Graham takes the lifetime achievement award, honoring more than six decades of contribution to Irish painting, while Wilkes receives the mid-career award for her multihyphenated practice across sculpture, painting, drawing and installation.

The €40,000 prize fund — about $44,800 — is divided between the two, with €25,000 going to Graham and €15,000 to Wilkes. Both artists will be honored during Dublin Gallery Weekend 2026, which runs from 5 to 8 November. The program is backed by Château La Coste and the law firm Addleshaw Goddard, and each winner has been invited to stage a solo exhibition at Château La Coste in Provence, France.

An international judging panel selected the recipients: Emma Goltz, chair of Studio Voltaire in London; Barbara Dawson, director of Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery; Brian Cass, head of Hayward Touring; the writer and critic Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith; and Mary McCarthy, director of the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork. The panel praised Graham for helping drive the 1980s resurgence of figurative painting, singling out work that pairs visceral depictions of the mortal body with fragments of plaintive text, and lauded Wilkes for a bruised beauty built from everyday materials.

To mark Dublin Gallery Weekend, the podcast Talk Art, hosted by Robert Diament and Russell Tovey, will record a live episode at the National Gallery of Ireland on 7 November with Graham, reflecting on his influence across a six-decade career. For a first edition, the award arrives with unusual institutional weight — and a clear ambition to give Irish visual art a recurring international platform.