Sarah Cunningham, a British painter whose abstracted pictures of forests charmed audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, has died after having gone missing in London this past weekend. She was 31, according to the Camden Police.
Lisson Gallery, which represents Cunningham, had posted news of her disappearance on Sunday, saying that she was last seen on Saturday.
On Monday, the Camden Police said it had been informed of what it described as “a casualty on the tracks” of the London Underground. At the time, the body had not been formally identified by Cunningham’s family, which had been notified of the casualty. “The death is being treated as unexpected but at this time it is not thought to be suspicious,” the Camden Police said in a statement.
Lisson Gallery confirmed her passing on Tuesday morning on Instagram. “We are devastated to confirm the death of Sarah Cunningham,” the gallery wrote. “Sarah was an incredibly talented, intelligent, and original artist who we have all called a friend. Her paintings are authentic, intuitive, and pure with the raw power to immediately foster connections with others – qualities reflected in Sarah’s own indomitable character.”
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Cunningham rose to prominence for paintings that appear to depict landscapes dense with trees, mountains, and bodies of water. But her images, which often contain jarring bursts of color, rarely appeared to outright represent these subjects. Just as certain forms begin to come into focus in her paintings, they appear melt away into their thick backgrounds.
“I am interested in creating this sense of place only to tear it down—and then build it up again,” she told Artsy in 2023, the year that publication put her on its “Artsy Vanguard” list. “I’m dealing with representation and I’m trying to rethink what we mean it to be.”
She often worked at a large scale and produced her paintings via unorthodox techniques. Rather than relying upon an easel, she sometimes painted with her canvas lain flat upon the floor. Those canvases could be made of linen or cotton.
Other times, she simply painted on small pieces of board, lending her work a rough-hewn quality. And past paintings, too, could be recycled, cut up and then reenlisted for new images.
The level of confidence seen in her process and her completed works was unusual for an artist of her young age—and she seemed to hint that she had more in store as well. She told Artsy that she had also been penning poems and making sculptures, though those three-dimensional works were “just for myself for now.”
Sarah Cunningham was born in 1993 in Nottingham, England. She attended Loughborough University’s art program as an undergraduate, disregarding her mother’s wishes that she not pursue a career as an artist, and began making collages about how scientists use taxonomy to categorize the natural world. “I’ve always found that way of thinking problematic,” she told Artsy.
Yet upon graduating in 2015, the economic strain of being an artist required her to take three jobs. “During the day,” she told Cultured, “I would drive a van carrying smoothie-making bikes all over the UK, a new city every day, to and from Nottingham. I was on the road all the time, often sleeping in service station car parks on the side of the motorway.” But, she added, “all I could think about was painting.”
In 2018, Cunningham participated in the La Wayaka Current Artist Residency in Armila, Panama, an experience that cemented in her mind the notion that she was on the right track. On the way there, she lost her luggage; the local Guna community supplied her with clothing, food, and materials to make her work. Surrounded by forest, she spent significant time with the Guna people, learning how they processed their dreams by discussing them in group meetings. That would end up informing her own painting style, which involved taking half-formed images from her head and committing them to canvas before she could even make sense of them.
Having now dedicated herself more fully to painting, she attended London’s famed Royal College of Art for an MFA in 2019, graduating in 2022. That same year, she had her first solo show at Almine Rech gallery in New York. The exhibition sold out the weekend before it opened.
Success continued to follow the next year, when Lisson Gallery added her to its roster. Lisson gave Cunningham her London solo debut in 2023 followed by a Los Angeles exhibition earlier this year.
In a 2022 interview with Art Plugged, Cunningham explained her art as a form of self-exploration. “Both looking at and making art, it’s a way of processing my life,” she said. “It makes me feel that my life is a part of this universe.”