Prominent Middle Eastern Galleries Participating in Art Basel

Art Basel is one of the most ­important contemporary art fairs in the world. More than 280 of the world’s leading galleries ­exhibit the works of over 4,000 artists during its four-day run in the Swiss city.

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Artists Spotted at Art Dubai, Now Showing at Venice Biennale

In Between the Lines, an installation by Issay Rodriguez and Katherine Nuñez from Manila was composed of books made from fabric and sheafs of papers carefully crocheted alongside study desk paraphernalia such as paper clips that had also been labouriously stitched.

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The Baby Whisperer: Anne Geddes on International Fame and Regional Work

Geddes does not consider her overwhelmingly cute ­subjects to be props for elaborate costumes. She is an artist and the babies in her photographs are part of a narrative. "The babies are not dressed up like insects or animals, they are playing roles as those characters," she says. "For me, my work is all about storytelling and I am giving them a voice."

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Artists Run New York: The Seventies

Terry Smith, an art critic, outlined this definition by saying that although artists in the 1970s and 1980s did not want to define their work, it would eventually be labelled as conceptual – the goal was to keep the audience guessing, not offer answers to themselves or their viewers – and to keep themselves at a critical distance from the very institutions they were railing against.

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How Picasso and Giacometti Inspired a New Exhibition in the Middle East

This exhibition is also is the first time these two artists have been compared in a scholarly fashion, which is important, not least because Picasso was a notoriously difficult character. His friendship with ­Giacometti seems to reveal a lot of respect for the younger’s talents.

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The Vulnerability Series: Abdalla Al Omari

Clearly trying to cause public debate, Omari will no doubt be successful in that, because this is not the kind of show that a viewer can pass over without comment but unfortunately, the artwork does not shed light on what it is like for these people, forced to leave their homeland with whatever they can carry and fall victim to traffickers, crooks and a whole corrupt system.

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Marwan Sahmarani: Drifting Island and The Bruce High Quality Foundation: The Second Coming

It is testament to the Lebanese artist’s mastery of the medium that, as his viewers take in each work as a whole, its stories reveal themselves easily. In his latest show, the tales are heartbreaking realities of our time.

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Beej: Sowing Seeds in a Sharjah Roundabout

Vikram Divecha is one of five artists who will represent the UAE at the Venice Biennale next month in Italy. He is also one of three UAE-based artists exhibiting artworks at the ongoing Sharjah Biennial. Yet his work is rarely found in a gallery.

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On Existentialism and Materiality with Tony Cragg

"My interest is not what things look like, but why they look like that," he says. "I don’t want to represent something or reproduce something we are already familiar with. I want to be involved with the internal structure of the material."

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