British painter Sarah Cunningham—an alum of the Artsy Vanguard 2023–24—has died at 31. Lisson Gallery, which represents her, confirmed her death, following her disappearance in London this past weekend.
On Sunday, Lisson Gallery announced that Cunningham was missing, having been last seen on Saturday. The following day, Camden Police reported a casualty on the tracks of the London Underground. The police are treating her death as “unexpected, but at this time, it is not considered suspicious,” they wrote in their 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,” Lisson Gallery wrote in a statement on their website. “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.”
Born in 1993 in Nottingham in England, Cunningham attended Loughborough University. Her childhood home neighbored woodlands, where she nurtured a bond with nature that greatly influenced her work. Ignoring her mother’s wishes not to pursue a career as an artist, Cunningham started off making collages and, most significantly, paintings, that critiqued the fixed categories invented by scientists and celebrated nature as a unified system.
Cunningham was celebrated for her kaleidoscopic landscapes, characterized by her expressive mark making and explosive color palette. Often focusing on forests, her dense, gestural paintings veered into abstraction as swathes of blue, green, red, yellow, white, or black intentionally obscured the details of these natural scenes. “I am interested in creating this sense of place only to tear it down—and then build it up again,” Cunningham said in her Artsy Vanguard 2023–24 interview. “The way you ontologically separate these things—animal, human, tree—I’ve always found that way of thinking problematic.”
After attending the La Wayaka Current Artist Residency in Panama, she attended the Royal College of Art in London, where she graduated in 2022.
Cunningham mounted her first solo show with Almine Rech in New York just months after graduating from the Royal College. By 2023, Lisson Gallery had announced its representation of the artist, giving Cunningham a London solo show, “The Crystal Forest,” in November.
