Ibrahim Shahda


Ibrahim Shahda was a figurative French painter born in Egypt.

Biography

Born in Al-Azizya, Egypt, Shahda joined the Cairo Fine Arts Academy in 1947, at age 18. He worked there under French painter Pierre Beppi-Martin. In 1955, three years after ending his studies, he won a Prize and organized his first exhibition. At the end of the same year, he decided to leave for Paris.
He applied as free student to the École des Beaux-Arts. He moved to the south of France, in Carpentras, but frequently traveled to Paris.
A first personal exhibition took place in 1958 at the Arlette Chabaud Gallery in Avignon. He won the Painting Prize from the Avignon Festival with La femme en noir, today part of the Fondation Calvet collection. He also won the Aix-en-Provence Painting Prize the same year. A second exhibition, shared with his friend Paul Surtel, was organized in Carpentras in 1960.
In 1962, unhappy with his work, he chose to return to Paris. In 1963 he visited Italy, then Brittany. In 1966, he returned to Provence, but spent several summers in Brittany.
The following decade saw him visit Belgium, Netherlands, Spain and Italy, and show his work in Paris, in Avignon, in Carpentras and in Marseilles. During each trip he visited museums and admired the great masters.
In 1975, Shahda fell seriously ill. He kept on painting, but felt threatened: "One must snatch work from passing time.". During a long remission, he worked on portraits - including those of fellow artists such as painter Michel Bonnaud or writer Pierre Autin-Grenier - and self-portraits, oil or pastel drawing.
Two exhibitions took place in Carpentras in 1981 and 1984. His health deteriorated again in 1985, but he kept on working harder than ever: still lifes, self-portraits and, despite illness and exhaustion, landscapes.
He died from cancer during the summer of 1991 in Aix-en-Provence hospital.
His widow, Anita, organized many posthumous exhibitions, in Paris, in various Provence towns, in Montpellier and in Ajaccio. She worked for years on a monograph which was published in 2014 .

Work

The Fondation Calvet in Avignon owns two paintings by Shahda, La Femme en noir from 1958 and a Self-portrait from the late 70s.
The Auberive Abbey and Musée Comtadin-Duplessis in Carpentras also host some of his work.
His style is highly personal, but has a clear link with some great painters of the past, as well as two of his contemporaries, Zoran Mušič and Francis Bacon, by the strength of his portraits and the refusal of abstract art.

Exhibitions

; Illustrations