Though widely known for his trailblazing conceptual sculptural compositions, Hassan Sharif was trained as a painter and first received recognition for his figurative paintings. 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. In Raising Hands No. 1 (2009) a figure stands next to a sphinx—both rendered in Sharif’s cartoonish, caricature-like style—with their hand above their head in an arc-like motion—simultaneously a sign of surrender, a plea for help, and a demand for acknowledgement. Obliquely referencing the political situation in the Middle East, Sharif’s composition serves as an indictment against authoritarianism. The work recalls the artist’s assertion, “every act from man is a political act. An artist is a realist by nature. So the function of my work of art is to say no to the authoritative orders, so I still feel and I consider myself as a realist."