SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- In a rare opportunity to view the works of Irelands most influential contemporary artist,
Meridian Gallery Arts Center is displaying over 35 works by the artist Patrick Graham, including paintings, collages, and drawings. This exhibition contains four of his monumental iconic diptychs. Two of these pieces, "Wreath" and "Somewhere Jerusalem," evoke the sense of ceremony, ritual, and a longing for space and homeland. Organized by Meridian Gallery Arts Center, the exhibition will tour under the gallerys auspices to; Katzen Museum of Art at American University (June 9, 2012-August 12, 2012) and the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at Saint Louis University (September 23, 2012-December 16 2012). The exhibition will include a full-color catalog.
Grahams work has also been the subject of exhibitions and symposiums internationally, including the National Gallery of Ireland, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Trinity College, Walker Art Gallery in England, the Hokkaido Museum in Japan, the University of Michigan, Northeastern University, and Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Works are selected from Jack Rutberg Fine Arts (LA), Grahams international agent.
Graham is widely considered Irelands major contemporary painter; Grahams paintings indeed have vistas that cannot be measured, his figures are fragmented, wounded humans, they are vulnerable, but promise endurance. - Curator Peter Selz
Graham has always created meditations in the form of landscapes and iconic imagery that touch upon questions pertaining to reality, the meaning of life, and the search for faith in a world of diminishing absolutes.
The landscape has influenced my work right up to the present, particularly the low horizon; and that great vista where you can encounter space, and figures in it, in all kinds of ways
.Silences. No conversations. A looking-in, rather than a lived experience. That looking-in on things has stayed with me: a self-contained art.
- Patrick Graham
Interior Visions. Irish Arts Review