The UK gallery Nottingham Contemporary has announced plans for the first institutional solo exhibition of the British artist Sarah Cunningham who died last year. The show, the largest presentation of her work to date, is due to open next autumn (dates to be confirmed).
“This is a particularly significant and moving moment because it marks a deeply meaningful homecoming: the return of the artist’s work to the city where she was born and raised,” says Lisson Gallery which announced representation of the artist in July 2023. Cunningham worked at Nottingham Contemporary as a gallery assistant.
Cunningham died in November 2024 aged 31; she was hit by a northbound Northern line train after stepping on to the track and walking down a tunnel at Chalk Farm station in north London. According to the BBC a coroner ruled that her death was accidental.
She graduated with a Masters from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 2022 and held her first solo exhibition, The Crystal Forest, at Lisson Gallery in London in 2023.
Originally from the Wollaton area of Nottingham, a city in the centre of England, Cunningham created a significant body of work after leaving the RCA. Her practice developed from her fascination with the natural world, both the urban jungle and especially the jungles of Central America.
Her distinctive, abstract style, with fleeting figurative imagery, was recognisable by exaggerated brushwork often made with an extended brush fashioned from scraps of wood by Cunningham. She frequently painted through the night, a habit formed when she held down jobs at two galleries—including the Nottingham Contemporary stint—as well as a delivery driver, often working a late or early-hours shift.
She eschewed the use of preparatory sketches “or any sense of a formal roadmap” and told the interviewer Lee Gordon that she often started a painting “by working on the floor with rags and brushes”. She added: “I treat the surface of the painting as a palette, the paint is pushed and pulled.”
Cunningham also exhibited in Aspen, Berlin, Los Angeles and Canada and had a longstanding relationship with the Bomb Factory Art Foundation in London.
Sarah Cunningham
courtesy: Lisson Gallery
