Born in 1946 in Bagan Datok, Perak, Mustapa Ibrahim attended Gombak Lane School and attended night classes at Maxwell Secondary School, Kuala Lumpur. As one of the painters who was directly involved in the establishment of the Anak Alam collective in 1974, he is still loyal to the simple way and outlook of life, which is held by the young people of Anak Alam in those early days.

In the late 1960s, Mustapa Ibrahim attended painting lessons organised by the Angkatan Pelukis Semenanjung (APS) at Studio Taman Budaya, Jalan Ampang in Kuala Lumpur. He depicted portraits and landscapes as an aspiring painter and later developed his style in the abstract genre. He believes that painting is not limited only to the real world, but also from the essence or spirit of the state of nature itself.

Mustapa creates artworks in serial form. For example, his work in the 1970s is known as the Love Series. Through his work, we can see two styles of his presentation, which is through focusing on organic elements that are still clearly shaped and secondly, directly to the presentation of organic-organic and biomorphic forms that are more refined. Through titles that imagine the poetry of nature, he illustrates feelings of contemplation to questions that rarely find answers.