San Francisco, California.- Meridian Gallery is showing “Patrick Graham — Thirty Years: The Silence Becomes the Painting”, on view through April 14th. In a rare opportunity to view the works of Ireland’s most influential contemporary artist, the gallery will display 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, the exhibition will tour under the gallery’s auspices to; Katzen Museum of Art at American University (June 9- August 12, 2012) and the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at Saint Louis University (September 23- December 16 2012). The exhibition will include a full-color catalog.
“Graham is widely considered Ireland’s major contemporary painter; Graham’s 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 Graham’s 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), Graham’s international agent.
In the Summer of 1989, Meridian Gallery opened its downtown performance and exhibition space with a show curated by Rolando Castellón (co-founder and first director of the Galería de la Raza) called Drawings from the Fourth World. That arresting show of work by seven San Francisco Bay Area artists from seven cultures and ethnicities set the pattern for much that was to come: Performances of music, film, poetry, occasionally – dance – and from the beginning, Saturday Afternoon Forums, where dozens of interdisciplinary artists have given voice. By “The Fourth World” Castellón (who was also the curator for the SF MOMA “MIX” program), meant “…that space that exists between geographical, political, and aesthetic borders.” That space is the one that Meridian with its shows, events and concerts of New Music consistently explores. The interns program is sited at the core of the gallery. Visit the gallery’s website at … http://meridiangallery.org