Ten Years of Art: Waddington Custot Dubai is a landmark group exhibition that celebrates the gallery’s first ten years in the region. It brings together many of the internationally renowned artists who have shaped the gallery’s programme since opening its Dubai space in 2016. On display until 18 July 2026, the exhibition serves as a reflection on the gallery’s achievements and as a testament to its commitment to presenting museum-quality modern and contemporary art to audiences across the Gulf.
The show offers a panoramic overview of Waddington Custot Dubai’s artistic vision. Paintings, sculptures, photography, ceramic works, and works on paper showcase the remarkable diversity of the gallery’s roster and create unexpected dialogues between twentieth-century masters and leading contemporary artists. The presentation highlights how distinct artistic practices, which range from abstraction and figuration to conceptual and environmentally engaged art, can coexist within a shared exploration of creativity, materiality, and human experience.
Waddington Custot traces its history to 1958, when Waddington Galleries opened on Cork Street in London’s Mayfair, founded by Victor Waddington. In 2010, following the death of chairman Alex Bernstein, French dealer Stéphane Custot took over the gallery’s shares; the partnership with Leslie Waddington gave the gallery its current name, and after Waddington’s death in 2015, Custot became sole director. In 2015–2016, Custot opened the Dubai outpost — Custot Gallery Dubai — in Alserkal Avenue, spotting a gap in a market where most galleries focused on Middle Eastern art, leaving room for a program built around Western modern and contemporary masters. Today the gallery represents the estates and practices of artists including Jean Dubuffet, Barry Flanagan, Peter Halley and Pierre Soulages, and in 2025 opened a third location in Paris.
Among the exhibition’s highlights are two intimate late watercolours by the celebrated Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Instantly recognisable for his signature style of generously proportioned figures, Botero’s visual language transformed exaggerated form into a vehicle for humour, tenderness, and subtle social commentary. Although modest in scale, Musician (2022) and Dancers (2022) retain the warmth and quiet wit that made his work beloved around the world.
The late Lebanese-American artist, poet, and writer Etel Adnan is represented by the ceramic work Mont Tamalpaïs II (2019), inspired by the California mountain that became one of the defining motifs of her art practice. Throughout her career, Adnan distilled landscapes into luminous planes of colour and simplified forms. Her ability to bridge painting, literature, and philosophy has made her one of the most influential artistic voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The themes of memory, identity, and belonging that run through her work continue to speak powerfully to audiences in the Middle East and beyond.
The exhibition also pays tribute to two of the most influential pioneers of modern art, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró. Although their visual languages differ significantly, both transformed the course of twentieth-century art through fearless experimentation and innovation. Picasso continually reinvented the possibilities of painting and sculpture, while Miró developed a poetic visual vocabulary populated by biomorphic forms, celestial symbols, and playful abstraction. Their presence lends historical depth to the exhibition and reflects the gallery’s commitment to showing works that have shaped the evolution of modern art.
Contemporary voices include Iranian-born artist Ali Banisadr, who creates richly layered paintings that blur the boundaries between memory, mythology, architecture, and imagination. His dynamic compositions invite prolonged viewing, gradually revealing figures and narratives embedded within swirling fields of colour. Meanwhile, British photographer Nick Brandt brings an environmental perspective through powerful images that document the fragile relationship between humanity and the natural world. Brandt’s photographs combine striking visual beauty with ecological urgency and encourage reflection on some of the defining challenges of our time.
Questions of ecology and the future are explored further in the work of Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno, whose practice merges art with architecture, engineering, and environmental science. Through visionary projects inspired by spiderwebs, floating structures, and sustainable technologies, Saraceno proposes alternative ways of imagining our relationship with the planet. His works find an intriguing counterpoint in the monumental steel sculptures of French artist Bernar Venet, whose mathematically derived arcs and geometric forms investigate structure, balance, and spatial perception.
The exhibition also features Chinese-French artist Chu Teh-Chun, who masterfully fused the expressive freedom of European abstraction with the philosophical traditions of Chinese landscape painting. His luminous compositions evoke both movement and atmosphere. French painter Fabienne Verdier similarly explores gesture and rhythm; she produces monumental canvases through carefully choreographed brushstrokes informed by years of studying traditional Chinese calligraphy. Italian artist Umberto Mariani contributes his elegant monochromatic relief paintings, where folded surfaces blur the distinction between painting and sculpture. French artist Georges Mathieu exemplifies the spontaneity and energy of post-war lyrical abstraction.
Meanwhile, British artist Marc Quinn employs sculpture, painting, and installation to examine the complexities of identity, biology, and the human condition. French artist Arnaud Rivieren explores material, form, and perception through refined sculptural compositions. Greek-born artist Sophia Vari brings a vibrant sense of colour and geometry to her distinctive sculptures inspired by architecture, nature, and the human figure. Together, these artists underscore the diversity of approaches that have defined the gallery’s programme over the past decade.
Ten Years of Art: Waddington Custot Dubai presents a compelling portrait of the gallery that has played an important role in enriching the UAE’s cultural landscape. It has consistently introduced internationally significant artists to regional audiences while fostering meaningful dialogue between global artistic traditions and the rapidly evolving art scene of the Gulf. Bringing together artists whose practices span continents, generations, and disciplines, the show celebrates not only the gallery’s achievements to date but also the enduring power of art to connect cultures, inspire curiosity, and transcend borders.
To get more information about Ten Years of Art, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
Additionally, you might be interested in attending Interwoven at the House of Arts in Expo City Dubai.
