In Memoriam: Sarah Cunningham, 1993–2024

5 November 2024

Sarah Cunningham painted soaring abstractions suffused with feeling and life, her emphatic and vibrant gestures conjuring both real and imaginary landscapes. Her paintings are intuitive and pure with the raw power to immediately foster connections with others – qualities reflected in the artist’s own indomitable character.

Her work depicts a world teeming with trees and forests, Cunningham having spent a significant spell with the Kuna people in the jungles of north Panama and much of her childhood exploring the woods around her native Nottingham, England. Her empathy for others and her curiosity for the natural world, literature, poetry and most of all painting, in all its permutations, imbues her work with a maturity and authenticity beyond her years. Sarah was steadfast in her pursuit and confidence of each painting’s veracity and existence.

She worked in a searching and experimental manner, re-working and dismantling each painting, often turning them upside down or re-stretching sections to create new conjunctions and multiple viewpoints. Cunningham leaves behind a body of paintings that continues to morph and grow in front of our eyes, alongside poems, notes and sketches that accompanied each research project and every new show.

Her preoccupation with our relationship to the world’s biomes and ecosystems, as well as her interest in the very nature of images themselves, was powerfully demonstrated in her solo exhibitions, while her generous, collaborative spirit was evident in her group exhibitions, residencies and academic studies. She was a force of nature herself, a painter’s painter, at ease with brush, oil and the handmade tools she created to extend her reach across her vast canvases, strewn as they were on the floor of the studio amid a sea of materials and references. Cunningham’s ability to invoke the spiritual and the physical through gesture and colour was among her greatest artistic gifts and one that remains alive in her work.

She was a supremely talented, intelligent, sincere and original artist and our thoughts and prayers are with her family, friends and those loved ones she left behind far too soon. She is survived by her parents, Eddie and Sue Cunningham and her brother Anthony Cunningham.

Sarah Cunningham was born in Nottingham, UK in 1993 and received an MA in Painting from Royal College of Art, London in 2022. In addition to her solo shows, 'Flight Paths', Lisson Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2024); 'The Crystal Forest', Lisson Gallery, London, UK (2023) and 'In Its Daybreak', Rising, Almine Rech, New York, USA (2022) her work was included in numerous group exhibitions in Aspen, Berlin, Nottingham, Seoul and Vancouver. She was a resident of La Wayaka Current’s Tropic 08N in 2015, as well as the recipient of the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award (2019) and the Djanogly Art Award (2019).