Selections from the Perić Collection
— The Arts Club, Dubai 29 September 2025 — 29 March 2026

Selections from the Perić Collection draws from the esteemed collection of Mato Perić. Spanning three floors of the Club, the installation presents key works by leading artists whose practices have shaped contemporary art over the past two decades. Described by Perić as ‘popular conceptual art,’ the throughline in the show, as in the collection, is a technical and intellectual rigour in works by artists who blend material experimentation with critical inquiry into experiences of identity and modern life.

Anchored by leading German artists, the first-floor hang includes works by Albert Oehlen, Jana Euler, Monika Baer and Katharina Grosse, artists whose practices variously use painting as a vehicle to explore our contemporary conditions of experience. Oehlen’s Untitled (Baum 39) draws on his long-running, rule-driven investigations into how representation and abstraction can be systematically re-wired. Euler’s canvases probe the social, cognitive and material grounds of paintings with works like From the Perspective of Margarine (2021) rerouting the viewpoint and scale to expose how images behave. Grosse transforms architectural space into expansive, immersive fields of colour, a striking example of painting created to be in dialogue with its built environment, while Baer interrogates the elasticity of painting, testing its capacity to register representation, abstraction and the body.

The Perić collection is resolutely international, and moving through the show reveals radical works by artists such as American Jacqueline Humphries, a pioneering abstract painter recognised for digital-age mark-making; British artist Helen Marten, whose assemblages collapse distinctions between object and image; and American Walter Price, who blends abstraction and figuration with narrative ambiguity. Often supporting artists from early in their careers, Perić collects in-depth and with purpose, demonstrated here in a focused section of works by artist Tobias Spichtig.  Featuring spectral and emotionally charged subjects, Spichtig’s motifs and image-transfer surfaces move between glamour and haunting, echoing his broader practice that probes memory and the afterlife of images.  

The show also features sculptural works by New York–based Aria Dean; Berlin artists Sung Tieu — Germany’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale — and Aleksandra Domanović; leading German artist Michael Krebber; and Michel Majerus, the renowned pop-art provocateur who died in a 2002 plane crash.

Together, the selected artists reflect the distinctive approach that defines the Perić Collection. An internationally active entrepreneur and patron, Perić’s collecting was never about ‘catching the bug’; rather, he embarked on a purposeful journey: creating a body of work with lasting positive cultural impact. Guided by his conviction that art can be both accessible and conceptually exacting, Perić’s collection of ‘popular conceptual art’ draws on the history of art while engaging the vernacular of popular culture. The result is a collection that invites layered entry: immediately legible to the passerby and inexhaustible to the close reader, underpinned by a belief in art’s power to generate encounters that are at once immediate and enduring.

The exhibition programme at The Arts Club, London and Dubai, is curated by Amelie von Wedel and Pernilla Holmes of Wedel Art.