In the 1940s, when the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine was only a teenager, she began to make waves in her country. In a painting of a woman, she expressed female sexuality in an unheard of way: the woman’s vulva was a red-winged butterfly and her ovaries were flamboyant birds. Around 1947, when Mahieddine was 16, the French art dealer Aimé Maeght discovered her work and gave her a solo show in Paris. Under Maeght’s guidance, Mahieddine was lifted from Algeria into the world, where her paintings were admired by Pablo Picasso and André Breton (who called her a Surrealist). Mahieddine died in 1998 at the age of 66, but her influence on Arab art endures. The Sharjah presents 70 of her gorgeous visions. —E.C.