Almost two decades ago, the moment that changed Dubai mainstay Gallery Isabelle began with a question posed to its founder: why wasn’t she looking at Emirati art?
The question emerged during a packed public discussion at JamJar in 2007. Isabelle de Caters, the Belgian founder of the gallery, was one of the panellists, speaking about her experience as one of Dubai’s few commercial gallerists at the time.
Up until that point, much of her attention had been focused outside the country, where she had built close relationships with artists after arriving in Dubai in 2002.
Back then, the city’s commercial art scene was still in its infancy. To start her own practice, De Caters carried artworks back from Tehran in suitcases and showed them wherever she could – in apartments, borrowed spaces and eventually from her own home.
Unbeknownst to her, though, Emirati artists had already built something of their own. A generation led by Hassan Sharif, Mohammed Kazem, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, Abdullah Al Saadi and Hussain Sharif had laid the foundations of a conceptual art movement that would later become central to the UAE’s now-thriving art scene.
As the discussion continued, de Caters could feel tension building in the room.
“I realised these were all practitioners from the region, artists from the region,” she tells The National. “They were really upset with me, that I didn’t look here in the country at what was going on.”
Then Bahraini artist Abdul Rahim Sharif stood up. Rather than turning the exchange into a confrontation, he extended an invitation. Come to The Flying House, the artist-run space he had established in Satwa, and see the work of his brother, Hassan Sharif.
It was the beginning of a relationship that would change the direction of the gallery.
“That is the very first work I saw by a local artist,” de Caters says.
Founded in Al Quoz in 2006 as B21 Gallery, the space that became Gallery Isabelle opened before the district had emerged as Dubai’s cultural centre, occupying a warehouse long before the galleries and institutions that would later define Alserkal Avenue arrived.
De Caters had no formal plans to become a gallerist when she moved to Dubai with her husband, who worked in oil and gas. Her earliest experiences in the art world came years earlier in Brussels, where, as a student, she helped run a tiny exhibition space called 20 Square Metres of Contemporary Art.
Hassan Sharif’s work did not offer the familiar cues she was used to reading in art. On that first visit to The Flying House, his assemblages demanded a different kind of attention.
“They were folded trays tied with rope, and it was really unconventional,” she says. “It was very challenging.”
But over the years, as her appreciation grew, the two grew from industry colleagues into genuine friends, a relationship that continued until his death in 2016.
“Meeting Hassan Sharif was a huge turning point,” she says. “Anybody who met him even once will always remember the interaction. His work was really philosophical. It takes you to dimensions that are completely beyond the actual work.”
And over time, Sharif's presence changed her in ways she wasn't expecting. De Caters describes him as one of the people who most shaped her life in the UAE – someone whose way of thinking spilled from work discussions into daily conversations about failure, patience and perspective.
“It has definitely impacted me in the way I looked at life,” she says. “Thanks to him, I approach difficult moments with more philosophy now.”
Since then, the gallery has been reshaped, first and foremost, by relationships with local creatives whose work continued to change what she expected from art.
“Everything has been informed by the artists I've encountered,” she says.
The gallery was also growing in a city where even the basic infrastructure around contemporary art was still being worked out. De Caters recalls researching how to stretch canvases herself, carrying lighting equipment back from Italy and explaining exhibition standards to framers.
“Nothing was available back then,” she says. “There were no skills in the market around art.”
She credits Sharif and his contemporaries with creating the foundations that allowed later generations to emerge through galleries, universities and institutions that did not exist when she first arrived.
“There was this fundamental base that was really created by these five Emirati artists,” she says. “Then there was this younger generation that wanted to become artists, and there were just no platforms for them to express themselves.”
“And now, we keep discovering new talents here that are unbelievable,” she says. “I admire the way they convey their messages. There’s always a lot of poetry and subtlety. I love the new generation of Emirati artists, and I’m also proud that we in this gallery are representing some of these early voices that showed them the way of being courageous and provocative.”
That growth is on display now at Gallery Isabelle’s 20th anniversary exhibition entitled Move, Pause, Return, which includes works by Emirati artists Hassan Sharif, Mohammed Kazem and Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim, alongside later-generation UAE artists such as Shaikha Al Mazrou and Jumairy, as well as artists from across the region.
After two decades, de Caters says the gallery is still guided by the same instinct: the power of great work to change how she sees.
“The more I’ve been challenged by the artist, the more excited I’ve been,” she says.
That is what will guide the gallery through its next steps.
“The work needs to talk to the soul,” she says. “That is going to be our driving force.”
Move, pause, return is on display at Gallery Isabelle until Thursday
