Katherine Bakhoum, of Franco-Egyptian heritage, has been a longtime Safarkhan resident artist, having held near-annual exhibitions with us since 1998. Bakhoum’s artistic style is a marriage of her multicultural upbringing, which saw her spend her childhood years in Egypt, before later moving to her also-native France. Bakhoum is renowned above all as an expert colorist, with a talent for combining diverse hues and working her palette in magnificent taste towards ways that few other artists can master. She has held a vast catalogue of personal and group exhibitions in reputed galleries predominantly across France, as well as in other diverse locales including Burkina Faso, Belgium, Dubai, Tunisia and Italy since 1986. 

Katherine Bakhoum represents in many respects a forgotten form of art. She draws upon the concept and the subject of orientalism and the enchantment of that period. Through her work she pays homage to her Egyptian origins and the magic and power of those bygone times she often seeks to recreate in her art. Bakhoum has succeeded in imprinting her own stamp to evoke a new world full of charm, nostalgia and magic that is deeply implanted in her canvas. Her power dwells in creating her own style of contemporary expressionism building upon the orientalism of old. Bakhoum’s art is inspired by her multicultural background, an Egyptian childhood and her adult life spent in France. 

‘What is left unsaid is as important as what is shown,’ is the adage that Bakhoum’s art adheres to. Her art contains decorative and figurative elements, reminiscent of a time when everything was texture and what wasn’t texture was veiled, a reincarnation of old spirits, dervishes, orientalist motifs and the stuff of a once magnificent civilization, which her art does so beautifully at reinvigorating with gusto and flair. The choice of ancient subject matter leaves echoes of the orientalist masters in her collages, echoes as well of ancient civilizations, of foreign lands, and domestic tapestries. Where there is beauty, there is hope, and Katherine Bakhoum has abandoned neither.

Biography and artworks courtesy of Safarkhan Gallery (Cairo).