Rising Artist Sarah Cunningham Found Dead After Going Missing

Thirty-one-year-old painterSarah Cunningham, who had only recently begun to gain acclaim for her massive, roughly brushed abstract landscapes, was found deceased after going missing following a night out with friends in London. Cunningham’s body was discovered early November 4 on the tracks of the Chalk Farm Underground Station in the borough of Camden, where she had last been seen at 2:30 a.m. November 2, on Jamestown Road. Her death, though currently under investigation, is not thought to be suspicious.

Born in Nottingham, England, in 1993, Cunningham graduated from Loughborough University’s art program in 2015, juggling three jobs to make ends meet while she pursued her career as an artist. “All I could think about was painting,” she toldCulturedin 2022. After a transformative La Wayaka Current residency in Panama that brought her into contact with the country’s Indigenous Kuna people, Cunningham enrolled in the Royal College of Art in 2019, receiving her MFA in 2022. That same year, she had her first solo show, at Almine Rech in New York. The show sold out before it opened, and the following year, the international Lisson Gallery added her to its stable, giving her a solo exhibition in London. A second solo show, “Flight Paths,” closed this past August at the gallery’s Los Angeles outpost.

Cunningham’s work is held in the Sprengel Family Collection in Hannover, Germany, and in the Al Thani Collection in Qatar.

“Sarah was an incredibly talented, intelligent and original artist who we all called a friend,” wrote Lisson Gallery in a post confirming Cunningham’s death. “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.”

Cunningham reflected on her own practice ahead of her Los Angeles show. “I imagine myself in flight when I am painting, scanning over the surface, searching for places to deep dive, touch down or lift off,” she told the gallery. “The paintings are journeys between the space of my body and the space of the outside.”