The UK gallery Nottingham Modern has introduced plans for the first institutional solo exhibition of the British artist Sarah Cunningham who died final 12 months. The present, the biggest presentation of her work to this point, is because of open subsequent autumn (dates to be confirmed).
“It is a notably vital and shifting second as a result of it marks a deeply significant homecoming: the return of the artist’s work to the metropolis the place she was born and raised,” says Lisson Gallery which introduced illustration of the artist in July 2023. Cunningham labored at Nottingham Modern as a gallery assistant.
Cunningham died in November 2024 aged 31; she was hit by a northbound Northern line practice after stepping on to the monitor and strolling down a tunnel at Chalk Farm station in north London. In accordance with the BBC a coroner dominated that her demise was unintended.
She graduated with a Masters from the Royal Faculty of Artwork (RCA) in 2022 and held her first solo exhibition, The Crystal Forest, at Lisson Gallery in London in 2023.
Initially from the Wollaton space of Nottingham, a metropolis within the centre of England, Cunningham created a big physique of labor after 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 distinctive, summary fashion, with fleeting figurative imagery, was recognisable by exaggerated brushwork usually made with an prolonged brush long-established from scraps of wooden by Cunningham. She incessantly painted via the evening, a behavior fashioned when she held down jobs at two galleries—together with the Nottingham Modern stint—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 instructed 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.”
Cunningham additionally exhibited in Aspen, Berlin, Los Angeles and Canada and had a longstanding relationship with the Bomb Manufacturing unit Artwork Basis in London.
Sarah Cunningham
courtesy: Lisson Gallery
