The death of the emerging British artist Sarah Cunningham, as confirmed by her gallery, has led to an outpouring of grief from figures across London’s art world.
Aged just 31, Cunningham was regarded as one of the most compelling new voices in British painting. Her body was found at Chalk Farm tube station this weekend after an urgent search from the Metropolitan Police.
Hettie Judah, the respected art critic and curator, described Cunningham as: “Such an impressive young woman – a deep thinker and a bold and exciting painter.”
Police investigating her disappearance confirmed a body had been found though formal identification is yet to take place. Lisson Gallery, which represented her, said in a statement: “We are devastated to confirm the death of Sarah Cunningham. Sarah was an incredibly talented, intelligent and original artist who we all called a friend."
Beyond her work, Cunningham will be remembered for her ability to reach people. The London-based artist and curator Jo Dennis, a close friend, remembered: “A sweet and bright soul, a lovely friend”.
“She was a sweetheart – and funny as hell,” Dennis told The Standard. “I’m so glad of the time I got to spend in her company. We spent hours in the pub talking about art.”
‘She was a sweet and bright soul, a lovely friend... and funny as hell’
The artist Frances Copeman, another friend, said: “She was a force of nature who cared deeply. And was a really attentive friend who gave her time to you. She wasn’t one for small talk. You can see it all in her work. She was completely dedicated to it.”
Born into a working class family in Wollaton, a rural district of Nottingham, in 1993, Cunningham initially studied a BFA in art – against the wishes of her concerned mother – at Loughborough University from 2012 to 2015.
Working as an artist was a labour of love that sometimes required her to take three jobs, including at the city’s Nottingham Contemporary gallery.
In an interview with the American magazine Cultured, she recalled the demands of working as an art student without being able to rely on family means “During the day, I would drive a van carrying smoothie-making bikes all over the UK, a new city every day, to and from Nottingham,” she said.
“I was on the road all the time, often sleeping in service station car parks on the side of the motorway. But all I could think about was painting.”
The demands of manual labour meant she had to paint at night. After a long shift on the road, and when many of her contemporaries were heading to bed or hitting Nottingham’s drinking holes, she would retreat to her makeshift studio and paint with a ferocious drive.
In order to remain productive, she would sometimes force herself to work without sleep for 40 hours straight, sometimes laying her canvases on the floor, sometimes painting with oils straight onto linen or cotton. In interviews, she spoke of only finishing when her arms ached with fatigue.
She made startling progress after enrolling at the Royal College of Art in London in 2019, where she completed a three-year masters degree in painting. In order to study at the highly competitive RCA, she gained a full scholarship from the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award.
At the college, her ability to meld colour and texture and manipulate form and figure were quickly noticed by gallerists. Shortly after she graduated, Artsy included her in the Artsy Vanguard as one of the 10 emerging artists of her generation. “Cunningham seeks out the essential and alive through her imaginary wildernesses and fluid forestscapes,” the London-based critic Gabrielle Schwartz wrote in Artsy’s tribute to Cunningham.
In order to remain productive, she would sometimes force herself to work without sleep for 40 hours straight
In July 2023, she joined the roster of Lisson Gallery, a leading commercial gallery that also represents British artists of the calibre and standing of Anish Kapoor, Richard Long and Julian Opie.
Often working on large-scale canvases, Cunningham’s work was characterised by a distinctive layering technique, achieved by applying multiple coats of paint that she manipulated by with a pallet knife, rag or sandpaper. The finished works hover between abstraction and landscape, and her recurring use of earthy shades — ochre and slate wrapped in misty blues— suggested childhood memories of the landscapes in Wollaton.
Her canvases were often deliberately left unfinished, prompting an inquiry into what the artist decided not to include in her work, and why. Some of her work reflected her life in nocturnal life in London, like the 2023 painting titled Night Bus Home, which featured in the first major solo show of her work, titled The Crystal Forest, at Lisson that year.
In July of this year, she shared pictures of herself in front of her work in Los Angeles, where they were being displayed in a solo exhibition titled Flight Paths at Lisson’s prestigious LA outpost. On Instagram, she shared images of her hugging trees in Joshua Tree National Park while in California for the show.
