Ibrahim Shahda (born October 2, 1929 in Al-Azizya, died August 28, 1991 in Aix-en-Provence) was a figurative French painter born in Egypt.
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Shahda, aged 16, joined the Cairo Fine Arts Academy in 1947. 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 quickly moved to the south of France, in Carpentras. A first 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 (Calvet Museum). He also won the Aix-en-Provence Painting Prize the same year.
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, at the Egypt Cultural Center, in Avignon, at the Ducastel Gallery, in the Carpentras Town-Hall and in Marseilles.
In 1975, Shahda became seriously ill. He kept on painting, but felt threatened : "One must snatch work from passing time.". During a long remission, he worked on portraits and self-portraits, oil or pastel drawing. He organized two exhibitions 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 summer 1991.
His style is highly personal, but has a clear link with some great painters of the past (Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Goya, Velázquez, Titian and Tintoretto, or van Gogh, Cézanne, Modigliani and Soutine), as well as two of his contemporaries, Zoran Mušič and Francis Bacon, by the strength of his portraits and the refusal of abstract art.
The Fondation Calvet in Avignon owns two paintings by Shahda, "La Femme en noir" from 1958 and a self-portrait from the late 70s.