Khepri, God of eternal rebirth
Inspired by the Ancient Egypt
Mixed media — sculptural mosaic — Unique work
80x100cm, Part of 1-Cosmogony collection, 2025
In ancient Egypt, Khepri embodied the solar cycle in its most immediate and intimate form: not the sun at its zenith, distant and commanding, but the sun at the moment of its rising, pushing its sphere upward from the darkness of the underworld into the light of a new day. This daily act of emergence, enacted without exception at every dawn, made Khepri the god not of power but of renewal, not of permanence but of perpetual becoming.
321 individually sculpted faces, moulded and painted in metallic pigments, form the scarab’s shell once assembled, their iridescent surfaces shifting with the light as the work itself shifts with the hours of the day, performing the same daily renewal that the god performs in the sky.
Daily resurrection, infinite metamorphosis. In transposing this ancient principle into a contemporary mixed-media work, Karine Mimoun asks whether we too carry the capacity to begin again each day, to shed what no longer serves, and to offer something new to our own existence and to the collective whole we are part of. From detail to deity, from fragment to totality, Khepri invites us to consider our place within a humanity in perpetual transformation, ever expanding, like the cosmos itself.
ABOUT THE WORK
The eye enters the work through the background, a vast field of scale-like reliefs painted in midnight blue, their crests outlined in gold with a mirror-finish metallic marker, so that the entire surface shimmers with a cool nocturnal light that shifts with the angle of view. This is not the blue of day but the blue of the hour before dawn, charged with anticipation, trembling on the threshold between darkness and the first appearance of the sun.
The scarab rises from the centre of the panel, its wings spread wide in two sweeping arcs that extend almost to the edges of the work. These wings are composed of narrow, elongated faces arranged in concentric curves, graduating in colour from deep turquoise at the body through rose to pale green at the tips, each face painted in metallic pigments and veined with fine filaments of silver that catch the light like the membrane of a living wing. The body of the scarab is composed of broader faces in deep green and bronze, their surfaces veined with filaments of bronze pigment, evoking the hard luminous carapace of the beetle and the density of the earth from which it rises.
At the base of the figure, the scarab’s legs rest on two arcs of faces in grey-blue tonalities, symbolising the earth from which the god departs each morning on his journey across the sky. Above, the solar disc crowns the composition as two concentric rings: the outer composed of faces in gold veined with red, the inner of skulls in delicate pink veined with bronze, marking the passage between death and rebirth with an unexpected tenderness. At the very centre, the cosmic eye rests on a textured flower outlined in gold, the still point around which the entire solar cycle turns.
Khepri in ancient Egyptian cosmology
Khepri is one of the solar deities of ancient Egypt, representing the sun at the moment of its rising, distinct from Ra (the sun at its zenith) and Atum (the sun at dusk). His name derives from the Egyptian verb kheper, meaning ‘to come into being’ or ‘to transform’. The scarab beetle, observed rolling balls of dung across the ground, became a powerful cosmological metaphor: just as the beetle pushes its sphere, Khepri was understood to push the solar disc across the sky each morning, drawing the sun up from the underworld and initiating the daily cycle of light, life and renewal.
Scarab amulets were among the most widely produced objects in ancient Egyptian culture, worn by the living as talismans of regeneration and placed over the hearts of the dead as symbols of resurrection. What distinguished Khepri from other resurrection deities was the dailiness of his function: not a single, final redemption, but renewal enacted every morning without exception. Transformation not as an event, but as a practice.
karine mimoun’s interpretation
For Karine Mimoun, Khepri is the most personally resonant work in the collection. The scarab as a symbol of rebirth appeared at a pivotal moment in her own life: the moment she chose to fully assume her identity as an artist and to make the dream she had carried since childhood the centre of her existence. In this sense, the painting is not only an interpretation of an ancient myth but a testimony, the record of a personal renaissance enacted in paint, plaster and metallic pigment.
The question that Khepri poses, what will you allow to end so that something new may rise, is one that Mimoun answered for herself in the making of this work. The daily renewal that the god embodies is not an abstraction for her but a lived experience: the discipline of showing up each day to a practice that demands everything, and the particular luminosity that comes from having chosen, consciously and irrevocably, the life you were meant to live.
This dimension of personal transformation does not diminish the universality of the work. If anything, it deepens it. The 321 faces that compose the scarab’s shell carry this history within them, each one a fragment of a life fully inhabited, assembled together into a figure that asks every viewer the same question it asked its maker: what are you waiting to become?
Rebirth and the 1-Cosmogony collection
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