British summary painter Sarah Cunningham has died on the age of 31. Cunningham had been declared lacking after she was final seen round Camden, London within the early hours of Saturday, November 2. Her loss of life was confirmed by Lisson Gallery, which started representing the artist final 12 months.
“Sarah was an incredibly talented, intelligent and original artist who we all called a friend,” the gallery wrote in a press release 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.”
Rapidly ascending in reputation over the previous couple of years, Cunningham is finest identified for her large-scale oil landscapes that stroll the road between the pure world and entropic abstraction. Her fluid fields of coloration are stimulated by gestural brushwork and sweeping, intuitive motions born from a chaotic proclivity to succeed in previous the boundaries delineating humanity from its environment.
Sarah Cunningham, “I Will Look Into the Earth” (2023), oil on canvas, 70 7/8 x 165 3/8 x 1 5/8 inches (180 x 420 x 4 cm)
Cunningham was born in 1993 in Nottingham, England, and spent her childhood within the woodlands, which had been deeply important to her. She acquired her Bachelor of Advantageous Arts diploma at Loughborough College in 2015, however was confined to a nocturnal studio schedule as she labored a number of jobs — together with driving a van filled with “smoothie-making bikes” throughout the UK, as she informed Cultured in 2022 — with a view to help herself and her apply.
In 2018, Cunningham traveled to Panama for the La Wayaka Present Artist Residency within the distant village of Armila alongside the southeastern coast. The residency embeds artists in pure biomes alongside their Indigenous stewards to discover the chances of ancestral information and very important biodiversity. Alongside the best way, Cunningham’s baggage was misplaced and the Indigenous Guna residents of Armila supplied her with clothes, meals, and artwork supplies to proceed her path. Deep within the rainforests bordering Colombia, Cunningham skilled the customs and generosity of the Guna individuals and was particularly fascinated with their apply of collective dream evaluation, which she later tailored into her personal apply.
Sarah Cunningham, “Flight Path” (2024), oil on canvas, diptych, 98 3/8 x 126 x 1 5/8 inches (250 x 320 x 4 cm)
Cunningham pursued a graduate diploma on the Royal School of Artwork (RCA) in London in 2019 upon deciding to pursue portray professionally, explaining throughout an interview with Artwork Sense podcast that her time on the college allowed her to “find her gesture in paint.”
Throughout her research, Cunningham occurred to come back throughout a analysis textual content by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “The Crystal Forest” (2007), that references the Guna neighborhood she stayed with. She was taken along with his description of the forest as a crystal, she informed Artwork 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 mentioned.
Left: Sarah Cunningham, “Memory String” (2024), oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 23 5/8 x 1 5/8 inches (80 x 60 x 4 cm)Proper: 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 incomes her diploma in 2022, the artist made a splash out there by means of her first solo present at Almine Rech gallery’s New York location that very same 12 months. She was quickly represented by Lisson Gallery, the place she debuted in London together with her solo present The Crystal Forest in 2023, rapidly adopted by Flight Paths on the gallery’s Los Angeles location in the summertime 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 mentioned of her first Lisson Gallery present on Artwork 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 by means of her works, that are additionally within the collections of the nonprofit London exhibition area The Perimeter and the Olivia Basis in Mexico, amongst others.
Sarah Cunningham, “Sunrise with Spirits” (2024), oil on canvas, 27 1/2 x 39 3/8 x 2 inches (70 x 100 x 5 cm)