SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates — Ethnic profiling is business as usual in the contemporary art market. The Emirati artist Hassan Sharif (1951-2016), who has a sensational retrospective at the Sharjah Art Foundation here on the edge of the Persian Gulf, was a born contrarian. Working in a range of seemingly unrelated media and styles, he made art that belongs to no locatable culture, or maybe to several. Advertisement Continue reading the main storyIf such work was only mildly far-out in England by the early 1980s, it was radical in the Emirates, where Sharif returned on summer breaks. In the Emirates at that time, the acceptable form of advanced contemporary Arabic work was calligraphic abstraction, which Sharif disdained, as he did all forms of “nationalist” art.

Source: New York Times December 28, 2017 22:41 UTC