Hillsboro Fine Art will present Patrick Graham’s new body of work in an exhibition titled Gilboa Iris as one of the principal highlights of Dublin Gallery Weekend 2025.

The title of this exhibition is Gilboa Iris (or Iris haynei) which is often seen as the national flower of Palestine, symbolising endurance and the connection between the people and their land. The Palestinian name for the flower is ‘Sawsan Faqqua’ or ‘Sawsan Gilboa’. In March and April of each year, thousands of people walk along a trail on Mount Gilboa to see the iris in flower.

In introducing to his work this symbolic flower struggling to survive in its war-torn habitat, Graham makes us question ourselves. As Sean Kissane remarked at a recent exhibition of Graham’s work at IMMA, “The painting becomes a site of layered grief – not only for human lives, but for the erasure of culture, memory and ecology. It asks us to hold all of this at once. And yet, within that act of holding, it also sows a new world of remembering, resisting and imagining otherwise”.

These powerfully rendered paintings achieve a precarious balancing of the personal and universal. Artworks in oil, graphite, ink and collage are themselves battlegrounds of a sort. Surfaces are torn and put back together, images scraped away leaving ghosts and memories. Beautiful, often isolated images appear and offer hope to a world we seem intent on destroying.

Patrick Graham has long been considered Ireland’s foremost painter, now in his 80s he is making his most powerful art. The exhibition opens on November 7th and runs until December 6th, 2025.