Katherine Bakhoum represents art that has been forgotten for a long while. She draws upon the concept and the subject of the orientalism and the enchantment of that period. Through her work we can feel the researches she has done to reveal her Egyptian origins and the magic and power of the bygone times. Katherine 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 old orientalism.

Katherine Bakhoum’s art comes up out of an Egyptian childhood and from the distance of a life spent in France. What is left unsaid is as important as what is shown. Decorative yes, as in old orientalism, when everything was texture and what wasn’t texture was veiled, a reincarnation of old spirits, grapery, orientalist motifs and the things of a once powerful civilization, the better to suggest it all might just come to life again.

The choice of ancient subject matters, the echo of Orientalist pieces in the collages, like the echo of the appeal of ancient gestures, of foreign lands, and domestic tapestries, all this weaves up out of Katherine Bakhoum’s creations. Sometimes we only have the line of a horizon on which to hang our imagination, sometimes we only have the trace of a profile in the shadows. What we always have is a persistent belief in beauty.