Paula Kamps, Painter of Tender Works About Memory, Dies at 36

Paula Kamps, a painter whose softly hued paintings showing flowers and blurring figures gained her recognition in Europe and the US, died at 36. Her Paris gallery, Sans Titre, confirmed her death on Tuesday, but did not state a cause.

Kamps’s paintings frequently dealt with the fleetingness of memory. Using thin washes of watercolor and ink, she represented figures and plants that appeared to be either coming into focus or fading away.

The painter André Butzer, an admirer of Kamps’s work who on at least one occasion showed her paintings alongside his own, once termed her flows of ink “stains,” seemingly in reference to the fact that they looked like splotches or bruises.

She painted landscapes and still lifes, dreamy portraits and hallucinatory tableaux. Often, her subject matter was surreal: a person smearing lipstick across their face, a man’s head forming a mountain range, three people who blend into leafy branches.

Born in 1990 in Cologne, Germany, Kamps first attended the Freie Universität Berlin’s philosophy program before entering the famed Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where her teachers included Lucy McKenzie. She then became a master student with the painter Tomma Abts before returning once again to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, this time under the tutelage of Elizabeth Peyton. She graduated in 2016.

After graduation, she moved to Chicago, where she made her solo debut with M. LeBlanc Gallery in 2021. That show included such works as Granny’s U.F.O. (2021), featuring a mysterious ink orb that obliquely alluded to alien phenomena. To create that piece and others in the show, she worked wet on wet, applying layers of ink and pigment before the ones on her canvas were already dried. She also airbrushed some of the works.

She started showing with Sans Titre that same year, and went on to exhibit virtually via David Zwirner’s Platform site and physically with Mou Projects gallery in Hong Kong and Galerie Christine Mayer in Zurich, which just staged a Kamps solo outing earlier this year. The Christine Mayer show came with a poem by Kamps, who also produced artist books. Titled “Mistress of Good Advice,” that poem concluded: “All flowers wilt differently, / all of them are good at keeping secrets, and they never pick themselves.”