Laila Shawa grew up in one of the oldest Palestinian landowning families. Her father, Rashad al-Shawa – a former mayor of Gaza and activist – passed on to her his revolutionary spirit, while her mother – an admirer of Simone de Beauvoir – instilled in her a strong belief in women’s power. L. Shawa is sometimes described as the “mother of Arab revolutionary art”, the reasons for which become clear when we consider her varied body of work, which, using an almost pop-art aesthetic, bears witness to political struggles.

Following unfinished studies in political science and sociology at the American University of Cairo, L. Shawa pursued her artistic training first at Cairo’s Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute (1957–1968) and then at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome (1958–1960). She completed her studies in Rome at the Scuola di Arti Ornamentali San Giacomo, graduating with a degree in visual and decorative arts (1960–1964). The summers of these formative years were spent studying with the expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) in Salzburg (1960–1963).

Upon completing her education, she returned to Gaza and began to supervise the art teaching at refugee camps there for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, simultaneously training with UN war photographer Hrant Nakasian. In 1967, she moved to Beirut, where she devoted herself wholly to painting for nine years. Between 1977 and 1987, the Lebanese Civil War led her to divide her time between London and Gaza, where she played a key role in the foundation and architectural conception of the Rashad Shawa Cultural Centre in Gaza, named in homage to her father.

Settling permanently in London in 1987, L. Shawa created a series of paintings entitled Women and the Veil – a socio-political critique of the wearing of the veil, to which she was opposed, a stance notably expressed in the emblematic work The Impossible Dream (1988). Her use of photography would leave its mark on contemporary Palestinian art with her project Walls of Gaza, started in 1992, which depicted the traumatic consequences of the Israeli occupation.

Between 1990 and 2000, she painted numerous series in which magic, the sacred, women and geometric form play central compositional roles. In the 2012 exhibition The Other Side of Paradise, she foregrounded the subject of Palestinian women suicide bombers with the striking Fashionista Terrorista series (2011). Her body of work, which was partly destroyed in 2009 when her home in Gaza was bombed, is creatively and politically challenging, tackling subjects such as colonialism, the patriarchy, extremism and sexism. The themes are interwoven from one work to the next, and continually re-examined as part of the seriality of the artist’s work. An example of this can be found in the sculpture series Where Souls Dwell No. 12 (2019) which presents weapons embellished with precious stones.

L. Shawa’s work is in public and private collections throughout the world, including the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the British Museum in London and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Charjah, as well as the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman and the National Art Gallery of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur.