Selected Works: Group Show - Dubai

Marking its first presence in the Middle East, the Charles Riva Collection presented a curated group exhibition in Dubai during Art Dubai 2025. The show brought together seminal works from Riva’s renowned international holdings, alongside his latest acquisition: Mute by London-based painter Preslav Kostov. Kostov’s expressive figurative language stood in dynamic dialogue with canonical pieces by some of the most influential postwar and contemporary artists.

Highlights included:

• Francis Bacon (1909–1992): Trois études pour un autoportrait (1990) – a powerful triptych of lithographs, offering fractured, intimate views of the artist’s face from shifting perspectives.
• Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957): No Title (This Must Be Painted!) (1991) – an ink drawing that combines image and cryptic text, showcasing the punk ethos and literary wit that define Pettibon’s visual language.
• Richard Prince (b. 1949): Untitled (2010) – a collage and acrylic painting from his Joke Paintings series, where deadpan humor meets biting commentary on American pop and masculinity.
• Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008): Dallas Cares (1998) – a late-period lithograph embodying the artist’s enduring push against traditional hierarchies of media and meaning.
• Anselm Reyle (b. 1970): Untitled (2008) – a mixed media on canvas work evoking neon glam and trash aesthetics, interrogating the divide between kitsch and fine art.
• Cheyney Thompson (b. 1975): Untitled (Blue-Red) (2009) – part of his Chronochromes series, mapping time and labor through abstract chromatic structures.
• Danh Vo (b. 1975): Cease to know or to tell. Or to see or to be your own. Have someone else's will as your own (2014) – a poetic assemblage featuring gold leaf and his father’s handwriting on a found cardboard beer box, reflecting Vo’s layered investigations of identity, inheritance, and displacement.
• Christopher Wool (b. 1955): Untitled (1990) – an alkyd on rice paper piece bearing his emblematic black eagle stamp motif, bridging repetition and defiance.
  
  

Bringing together works that span abstraction, conceptualism, appropriation, and personal narrative, the exhibition reflected Charles Riva’s continued commitment to collecting across generations and geographies, fostering dialogues between emerging voices and iconic legacies.