Selected Works

The Charles Riva Collection announces the opening of its Brussels space on April 20, 2026, marking a pivotal moment in the collection’s evolution with the presentation of a significant body of newly acquired works. Installed within a refined modern domestic setting, the exhibition stages a rigorous and sustained dialogue between sculpture, painting, and photography whilst traversing the historical continuum between postwar and contemporary artistic production. These themes are central to Riva’s collecting sensibilities. This presentation brings together key works by some of the most consequential artists of the 20th and 21st Centuries,  with particular attention to the critical legacies of postwar American art. 

 

Among the new principal acquisitions, on view for the first time, are newly acquired works by Alexander Calder and Richard Prince, whose practices have each reconfigured the parameters of artistic form and cultural meaning. Calder’s investigations into movement, balance, and spatial dynamism fundamentally transformed sculptural practice, giving rise to an expanded understanding of form as contingent, relational, and temporally activated. In contrast, Prince’s Untitled mobilise language as both medium and subject, appropriating vernacular humor to expose the unstable conditions of authorship and the circulation of meaning within contemporary culture. By translating jokes into painted form, Prince foregrounds the slippages between text and image, positioning language itself as a site of both production and critique. In this context, his work establishes a productive counterpoint to Jenny Holzer’s text-based practice, in which language assumes a declarative and public function, oscillating between inscription, authority, and affect.

 

The exhibition further reactivates key works by Donald Judd,  Christopher Wool, Mike Kelley, George Rickey, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Josh Sperling, Paul McCarthy, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Steven Shearer. Taken together, these artists articulate a complex and heterogeneous field of postwar and contemporary production, encompassing minimalism, conceptual, pop, and photography. Their juxtaposition generates a dense discursive framework structured around seriality, repetition, linguistic inscription, identity formation, and the instability of meaning. Moreover, the collection demonstrates how living with art elevates and activates domestic spaces and creates unexpected focal points, and discourse. 

 

Through a precise orchestration of spatial and conceptual relationships, the presentation invites viewers to consider the artwork as both an autonomous entity and a relational construct—operating across media, temporalities, and ideological positions. The domestic exhibition context serves not merely as a setting but as a critical device, collapsing distinctions between private and public modes of reception, and foregrounding intimacy, proximity, and lived experience as integral to the act of viewing.