British abstract painter Sarah Cunningham has died at the age of 31. Cunningham had been declared missing after she was last seen around Camden, London in the early hours of Saturday, November 2. Her death was confirmed by Lisson Gallery, which began representing the artist last year.
“Sarah was an incredibly talented, intelligent and original artist who we all called a friend,” the gallery wrote in a statement on Instagram. “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.”
Quickly ascending in popularity over the last few years, Cunningham is best known for her large-scale oil landscapes that walk the line between the natural world and entropic abstraction. Her fluid fields of color are stimulated by gestural brushwork and sweeping, intuitive motions born from a chaotic proclivity to reach past the boundaries delineating humanity from its surroundings.
Cunningham was born in 1993 in Nottingham, England, and spent her childhood in the woodlands, which were deeply significant to her. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Loughborough University in 2015, but was confined to a nocturnal studio schedule as she worked multiple jobs — including driving a van full of “smoothie-making bikes” across the United Kingdom, as she told Cultured in 2022 — in order to support herself and her practice.
In 2018, Cunningham traveled to Panama for the La Wayaka Current Artist Residency in the remote village of Armila along the southeastern coast. The residency embeds artists in natural biomes alongside their Indigenous stewards to explore the possibilities of ancestral knowledge and vital biodiversity. Along the way, Cunningham’s luggage was lost and the Indigenous Guna residents of Armila provided her with clothing, food, and art materials to continue her path. Deep in the rainforests bordering Colombia, Cunningham experienced the customs and generosity of the Guna people and was specifically fascinated with their practice of collective dream analysis, which she later adapted into her own practice.
Cunningham pursued a graduate degree at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London in 2019 upon deciding to pursue painting professionally, explaining during an interview with Art Sense podcast that her time at the school allowed her to “find her gesture in paint.”
During her studies, Cunningham happened to come across a research text by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “The Crystal Forest” (2007), that references the Guna community she stayed with. She was taken with his description of the forest as a crystal, she told Art Sense, emphasizing the “multiplicity in this network — different sides and angles and perspectives — which is very much how the Guna see the forest as well.”
“I’ve been working within those parallels in my painting and myself,” Cunningham said.
Right: Sarah Cunningham, “Ghosts in the Throat” (2024), oil on canvas, 51 1/8 x 39 3/8 x 2 1/8 inches (130 x 100 x 5.5 cm)
Upon earning her degree in 2022, the artist made a splash in the market through her first solo show at Almine Rech gallery’s New York location that same year. She was soon represented by Lisson Gallery, where she debuted in London with her solo show The Crystal Forest in 2023, quickly followed by Flight Paths at the gallery’s Los Angeles location in the summer of 2024.
“When you have The Crystal Forest as the title, we’re naturally trying to find our footing in these untrodden paths where there are no footsteps,” Cunningham said of her first Lisson Gallery show on Art Sense. “I’ve been trying to cultivate this forest-like mindfulness in my studio for some time. I’ve sort of tapped on this before, but the associations that we make with marks and gestures are fascinating to me.”
Cunningham’s legacy lives on through her works, which are also in the collections of the nonprofit London exhibition space The Perimeter and the Olivia Foundation in Mexico, among others.
