The physique of a lady, believed to be that of the lacking artist Sarah Cunningham, has been present in London.
Cunningham, an award-winning painter who had not too long ago wrapped Flight Paths, a solo present at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles, disappeared after an evening out final Friday and was shortly flagged as lacking. Regardless of a variety of reported sightings—together with one in all her allegedly getting right into a automobile in London’s Camden neighbourhood—police had been unable to find her.
Previous to the invention of the physique of a lady who was carrying garments that matched the outline of the lacking 31-year-old, members of the family, buddies and fellow artists took to social media to explain Cunningham, who graduated with a Masters from the Royal School of Artwork (RCA) in 2022 and who held her first solo exhibition, The Crystal Forest, at Lisson Gallery in London final 12 months, as a “beloved” good friend who was final seen carrying a black costume with Converse sneakers.
On Monday (4 November) police launched a press release to The Artwork Newspaper confirming a physique had been retrieved from railway tracks beside the Chalk Farm station. No additional remark was accessible pending formal identification. Cunningham’s household had been knowledgeable of the newest growth, police mentioned. Police are at the moment treating the dying as sudden, however at current it isn’t considered suspicious.
On the time of her disappearance she had exhibited in Aspen, Berlin, London, Los Angeles and Canada. She additionally had a longstanding relationship with the Bomb Manufacturing facility Artwork Basis in London and had been represented by Lisson since July 2023. A spokesperson for Lisson declined to remark. On Sunday the gallery posted a message on Instagram about Cunningham’s disappearance and urging anybody with details about her whereabouts to contact the police.
Her distinctive, summary fashion, with fleeting figurative imagery, was recognisable by exaggerated brushwork usually made with an prolonged brush usual from scraps of wooden by Cunningham. She often painted by way of the night time, a behavior shaped when she held down jobs at two galleries—together with the Nottingham Up to date—in addition to a supply driver, usually working a late or early-hours shift.
She eschewed the usage of preparatory sketches “or any sense of a proper roadmap’ and not too long ago informed the interviewer Lee Gordon that she usually began a portray “by engaged on the ground with rags and brushes”. She added: “I deal with the floor of the portray as a palette, the paint is pushed and pulled.”
Her monumental triptych panorama I’ll look into the earth (2023) attests to the mature expertise that beforehand gained her the Djanogly Artwork Award and the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award, each in 2019. She credited the latter with permitting her to outlive the exorbitant prices of dwelling and learning artwork in London, the place she usually took the all-night public transport—captured in her 2023 portray Evening Bus House.
Within the catalogue that accompanied her first solo present, Cunningham is described as a painter who “seeks out the important and the alive by way of her imaginary wildernesses and fluid forestscapes. […] Half summary experimentation, half religious journey, each portray at some degree represents the intuitive and unstated connection between nature and humankind.”
Initially from the Wollaton space of Nottingham, a metropolis within the centre of England, Cunningham had created a big physique of labor since leaving the RCA. Her apply developed from her fascination with the pure world, each the city jungle and particularly the jungles of Central America.
Her canvas Crystal Forest (2023) was the product of a 2018 residency in Panama organised by La Wayaka Present. That have had a profound affect on her work, and she or he mentioned the influence of her interactions with the Indigenous Kuna individuals in a chat she gave in her native metropolis on her return.
Alongside her embrace of the setting, Cunningham additionally operated on a way more granular degree, recalling with Gordon how when she had been requested to make a fee for somebody who was terminally unwell, she “realized how a portray can present or supply a way of refuge or consolation”.
Forward of her latest present with Lisson in Los Angeles, Cunningham informed the gallery: “I think about myself in flight when I’m portray, scanning over the floor, trying to find locations to deep dive, contact down or carry off. The work are journeys between the area of my physique and the area of the surface.”
