The British painter Sarah Cunningham, whose spirited, gestural style made her a rising star, has died aged 31, her gallery Lisson confirmed this morning. Cunningham had gone missing after a night out with friends over the weekend and her body was found two days later. Her death was unexpected but is not being treated as suspicious. In a statement, Lisson described her as “an incredibly talented, intelligent, and original artist who we all called a friend.”

It is easy to feel pulled into Cunningham’s strangely hypnotic landscapes, which are enlivened by nature’s entangled chaos and a layer of psychological tension. “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,” Lisson’s statement continued.

“Everything I make begins with my body,” she told Art Plugged in 2022. “It’s the container for my memories and feelings that I translate into painting and language.”

Born in Nottingham in 1993, Cunningham loved drawing from a young age so ignored any more practical advice she received and pursued a degree in fine art at Loughborough University. There, she worked primarily in collage. She later said she looked back on this period “very fondly,” adding “although I wasn’t working in oil at the time it was the start of a lot ideas for me.”

Sara Cunningham in her studio. Photo: George Darrell, courtesy of Lisson Gallery.

After graduating in 2015, Cunningham spent several years working as as a van driver, an arduous job that took her up and down the U.K. and often required her to work nights. Even years later, she often chose to work strange hours, welcoming the kind of woozy or erratic mindsets that tend to kick in after 2 a.m.

It was only upon receiving a fortuitous gift of oil paints from a friend that Cunningham discovered her true talents for painting. “The fluidity and autonomy of the pigment, the way it could stretch and dissolve—I never looked back,” she told Artsy last year. She began making paintings that she exhibited at local Nottingham venues like Lakeside Arts and the artist-led non-profit Primary. Her primary sources of inspiration were her own photographs, found images, plants, shells, and poems.

After this breakthrough, Cunningham established a studio at the artist-led Backlit Gallery. In 2018, she was chosen for a research residency by the artist-led non-profit La Wayaka Current, inviting her to live and work with the Indigenous Guna communities in Panama. “My interest is in the textures and landscapes through which this Indigenous community identifies themselves and whether this creates a common memory,” she wrote before leaving for the residency.

“I will be asking members of the indigenous community to produce descriptions of home and landscape,” she added, “focusing on ideas of belonging.” These descriptions would form the basis for a new series upon her return to England.

Installation view of Sarah Cunningham, “The Crystal Forest,” at Lisson Gallery. Photo courtesy Lisson Gallery.

In 2019, Cunningham received the Ali. H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award, allowing her to enroll into the highly competitive painting M.A. at the Royal College of Art in London. She graduated in 2022, the same year she received her first solo show at Almine Rech in New York.

On Instagram, Cunningham’s good friend and peer at the RCA, Sophie Goodchild, recalled how, one day, she whispered “excitedly and seemingly in disbelief” that she was to have her inaugural show at the international powerhouse Lisson Gallery in 2023. The works in that exhibition, “The Crystal Forest,” appeared to merge mystical woodlands in Cunningham’s mind, from the ancient Sherwood Forest near where she grew up to the lush tropical rainforests of Panama.

This triumphant debut was followed up this year by “Flight Paths” at the gallery’s Los Angeles location. Since 2021, Cunningham had regularly exhibited in international group shows, including at Almine Rech in New York and Aspen in 2021, Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin in 2022, and the non-profit CICA Vancouver, and Lisson’s Seoul location in 2023.