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.
