Though widely known for his trailblazing conceptual sculptural compositions, Hassan Sharif was trained as a painter and first received recognition for his figurative images. In some of his late works on paper, Hassan Sharif repeated the gesture of a raised hand, abstracting the movement until its meanings collapse and run together. Depicted in Sharif’s cartoonish, caricature-like style, the figures in Raising Hands (2009) raise their hands above their heads in an arc-like motion—simultaneously a wave goodbye, a sign of surrender, a plea for help, and a desire for acknowledgement. "My cynical view of life is a result of my practicing painting cartoons to criticize social and political phenomena,” Sharif explained. “My work as a caricaturist honed my sardonic perspective; at the time, I was immersed in the tumult and the ‘culture of revolution’ and the sloganeering that have, for a long time, been used as a stick to keep the Arab people in line, and that have hindered their ability to make any conclusive existential decisions about their collective fate.”