Remembering Silke Otto-Knapp (1970–2022)
Stefan Kalmár writes a personal note to his friend Silke Otto-Knapp, the artist and professor of painting and drawing at UCLA’s School of the Arts and Architecture, Los Angeles who died last month of ovarian cancer at the age of 52.
Losing you is like losing the other side of a story.
Sometimes, our biographies make us the most unlikely protagonists on someone else’s stage. It was 1990 when we met. You took me to the nightclub Heaven and I gave you your first red lipstick. We studied Judith Butler, John Fiske, Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci at a time when Theodor Adorno and Jean Baudrillard were top-shelf material. We were given homework like: ‘Please apply today’s reading list to your understanding of Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach”.’ Do you remember the mural you painted over my bed? I wonder what happened to it?
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Frieze website.
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