Sarah Cunningham’s Vivid Worlds Emerge at Nottingham Contemporary
A major retrospective brings together the late British artist's expressionistic paintings, which layer gestural marks and shifting colour to reveal imaginary wildernesses and alternative ways of understanding our relationship with nature.
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Colour bleeds and gestures accumulate across Sarah Cunningham’s canvases like whispered conversations between the visible and the imagined. Her painterly language, built through relentless layering, overpainting and erasure, creates compositions that seem to breathe and shift as one moves through them, revealing hidden worlds beneath surfaces of profound chromatic intensity.
Now at Nottingham Contemporary, ‘Midnight Sun’ marks the first UK institutional solo exhibition of the late British artist, and stands as her largest presentation to date. Held within her hometown, the exhibition gathers early work alongside pieces that have never before been seen publicly, drawn from the artist’s studio itself. These paintings emerge from a particular alchemy: Cunningham drew simultaneously from science fiction, from art history’s depths, and from ecological observation, weaving these sources into visual narratives that exist somewhere between abstraction and spiritual inquiry.
The works evoke imaginary wildernesses and shifting forest landscapes, yet they resist simple representation. Rather, through accumulated marks, through the dialogues between colour and light, Cunningham constructed something more elusive: a visual language for the intuitive relationship between nature and humankind. Her paintings become invitations to imagine alternative ways of inhabiting and understanding the world, spaces where the rational meets the dreamlike.
An Immersive Encounter
At Nottingham Contemporary, ‘Midnight Sun’ extends beyond the boundaries of traditional painting. Colour, movement and sound flow into the surrounding architecture, dissolving the separation between artwork and viewer. The experience becomes immersive, almost architectural in its ambition, asking visitors to inhabit these worlds rather than simply observe them.
This is painting as continual becoming, as process made visible. Each composition speaks to Cunningham’s meticulous yet intuitive approach, where the act of creation itself becomes a form of exploration, each layer a conversation with what came before. The hidden worlds that emerge from beneath accumulated pigment and gesture speak to something profound about artistic vision: the belief that beauty and meaning can be found in the spaces between intention and accident, between what is erased and what remains.
Imagery courtesy of Lisson Gallery (@lisson_gallery).
