Sarah Cunningham in her painting studio, surrounded by the imagined landscapes and abstract works that shaped her distinctive practice. Some of these paintings will be in Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun at Nottingham Contemporary. Photo: Magda Kuczmik, Fabula. Image courtesy of Lisson Gallery.
Nottingham Contemporary will host Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun, a major exhibition featuring imagined landscapes and previously unseen paintings.
BY ARTCENTRON ART NEWS DESK
This autumn, Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun will bring the work of one of the most distinctive young voices in British painting back to Nottingham. Cunningham was born and raised in the city.
The exhibition opens at Nottingham Contemporary on October 9, 2026. It will be the first institutional solo exhibition of Cunningham’s work and the largest presentation of her paintings to date. It will bring together works from across her career, including paintings that have never been exhibited before.
Cunningham died in 2024 at the age of 31. She left behind paintings that exist between landscape and abstraction. Her imagined forests and wildernesses are neither straightforward depictions of nature nor entirely abstract compositions. Instead, they turn landscape into a psychological, ecological, and imaginative space.
For Nottingham Contemporary, Midnight Sun also represents a homecoming. Cunningham’s connection to Nottingham remained important throughout her artistic development. The city’s landscapes and cultural life helped shape the practice that later took her onto the international art scene.
What Is Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun?
Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun presents an overview of the artist’s practice. The exhibition explores nature, ecology, imagination, and the relationship between humans and the more-than-human world.
Cunningham’s landscapes often look familiar at first. Forests, clearings, foliage, and bursts of light emerge from the canvas. Yet these environments become less stable the longer you look at them. Forms dissolve into gestural marks and color. Spaces appear to open and close at the same time.
This instability sits at the heart of Cunningham’s work. She did not simply reproduce landscapes. Instead, she used painting to construct alternative environments. These places can feel familiar while remaining impossible to locate.
Nottingham Contemporary describes her paintings as “imaginary wildernesses and fluid forestscapes.” Cunningham drew on speculative fiction, art history, ecology, and personal references. Her practice combined abstract experimentation with a spiritual exploration of the connection between nature and humanity.
The result is a distinctive form of contemporary landscape painting. It asks viewers to reconsider what a landscape can be. It also encourages them to rethink their place within it.
Sarah Cunningham’s Paintings: Between Landscape and Abstraction
Cunningham’s work refuses to settle neatly between figuration and abstraction.
Her paintings contain recognizable elements of the natural world. She then disrupts those elements through color, gesture, and movement. A forest can become a field of energetic marks. A clearing can dissolve into color. Light can seem to move through the painting rather than simply illuminate it.
Cunningham built her canvases through layers of paint. She repeatedly added to and obscured earlier marks. Lisson Gallery describes this process as continual obliteration and overpainting. Through it, hidden worlds gradually emerge from complex spatial structures.
This approach gives the paintings their sense of movement. The landscape never feels completely fixed. Instead, each work appears to remain in a state of becoming.
Cunningham also experimented with the physical act of painting. She used branches and wooden extensions to brushes to change the reach and movement of her arm. These methods altered the relationship between her body, her tools, and the canvas.
The resulting paintings feel highly physical. Cunningham did not simply picture forests. She built them through layers of bodily movement and gesture.
Nature, Ecology and the Imagined Landscape
Nature was more than a recurring subject for Cunningham. It provided a way for her to think about the world.
Her interest in ecology developed alongside an understanding of nature as an interconnected system. This perspective helps explain why her paintings resist a clear separation between people and the environments around them.
In 2018, Cunningham became a resident of La Wayaka Current’s Tropic 08N program in Panama. The experience contributed to her developing interest in landscape, belonging, and ecological relationships.
Forests and natural environments became increasingly important within her paintings. Dense woodland, light, color, and organic movement formed a recurring visual language.
Her paintings should not, however, be read as straightforward illustrations of ecological ideas. Their ambiguity remains important. Cunningham did not present an untouched natural world. Instead, she explored a relationship between nature, memory, imagination, and human perception.
The Influence of Science Fiction and Other Worlds
Cunningham’s interest in speculative fiction helped her move beyond conventional ideas of landscape.
Her forests often seem to belong to another reality. They can feel lush and inviting before becoming strange or disorienting. This quality connects her work to speculative world-building. She created environments that allow us to imagine different forms of existence.
Science fiction gave Cunningham another way to think about landscape. Rather than treating it as a backdrop, she approached it as a possibility.
Her paintings sit between remembered landscapes and invented ones. They ask what might happen if the forest became more than something we observe. Could it become a world with its own systems, rhythms, and forms of intelligence?
This idea connects Cunningham’s ecological interests with her fascination with imagination. Her landscapes become places where alternative ways of living can be considered.
From Nottingham to the International Art World
Cunningham was born in Nottingham in 1993. She studied fine art at Loughborough University before completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2022.
Her career developed rapidly after her postgraduate studies. She presented In Its Daybreak, Rising at Almine Rech in New York in 2022. This was followed by The Crystal Forest at Lisson Gallery in London in 2023 and Flight Paths at Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles in 2024. Her work also appeared in group exhibitions internationally.
Cunningham’s Nottingham background remained an important part of this development. Her relationship with the city connected her paintings to ideas of landscape, memory, and place.
The speed of her career makes Midnight Sun particularly significant. The exhibition does not simply present Cunningham as a promising young painter whose career ended prematurely. It offers an opportunity to examine the depth and development of the work she produced.
The Nocturnal Quality of Cunningham’s Work
The title Midnight Sun provides an evocative way into Cunningham’s practice.
The phrase describes the phenomenon in which the sun remains visible during the night. It also captures a tension that runs through her paintings. Darkness meets illumination. Concealment meets revelation. The familiar meets the unknown.
Cunningham developed a nocturnal studio practice earlier in her career. Financial and professional pressures often limited the time she could spend painting. She therefore worked at night. That atmosphere remained present in her later paintings.
Her works often move through deep colors and shadow before bursts of brightness emerge from the surface. Nottingham Contemporary describes her practice as unusual and nocturnal. Her paintings can dwell in darkness before moving towards something like the arrival of dawn.
Light therefore does more than illuminate Cunningham’s landscapes. It helps shape their emotional and spatial structure.
Imagined Wildernesses and the Human Relationship with Nature
Cunningham’s paintings make the natural world feel both intimate and strange.
Her forests are recognizable enough to evoke real landscapes. Yet she transforms them enough to prevent a conventional reading. They become places of possibility rather than fixed geographical locations.
This approach also challenges traditional ideas about landscape painting. Landscape has often been associated with territory, ownership, beauty, and representation. Cunningham unsettled these ideas by treating landscape as fluid and psychologically charged.
Her forests do not function as passive scenery. They appear to have their own presence and agency.
The paintings therefore encourage a different understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature. The boundary between observer and environment becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.
Highlights of Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun
The exhibition will bring together works from different stages of Cunningham’s career. This will allow visitors to trace the development of her visual language.
Three key works associated with the exhibition are The World It Softly Lulls (2021), Starshine and Clay (2022), and Via Lucis [Way of Light] (2023).
The World It Softly Lulls evokes the mythical forest environments that became central to Cunningham’s practice. Via Lucis [Way of Light] focuses more directly on transition and illumination. Starshine and Clay brings those ideas towards a brighter and more energetic conclusion.
Together, the works suggest a movement through Cunningham’s practice. They move from darkness towards light. They move from recognizable landscapes towards abstraction. Additionally, they also move from observed nature towards imagined worlds.
The inclusion of previously unseen work adds another important dimension. It allows the exhibition to revisit familiar paintings while revealing less familiar aspects of Cunningham’s development. Nottingham Contemporary describes Midnight Sun as the largest presentation of her work to date.
Sarah Cunningham’s Artistic Legacy
Cunningham’s career lasted only a few years at an international level. Yet her paintings established a distinctive voice within contemporary British painting.
Her work resists easy categorization. It can be discussed through landscape painting, abstraction, ecological art, and speculative fiction. None of these categories fully contains it. Instead, Cunningham worked between them.
This gives Midnight Sun significance beyond the presentation of a recently deceased artist’s work. The exhibition gives her paintings space to stand on their own. It also places them within wider conversations about ecology, climate, landscape painting, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
Cunningham’s death in 2024 brought a sudden end to a rapidly developing career. Midnight Sun therefore offers both a survey of what she achieved and an opportunity to consider the questions her paintings leave behind.
A Homecoming at Nottingham Contemporary
The Nottingham setting adds another layer to the exhibition.
Cunningham was born in Nottingham in 1993 and spent her formative years in the city. Her connection to its landscapes and cultural institutions remained important as her career developed.
Bringing her paintings back to Nottingham changes how we can approach them. The forests in her work may look imaginary, but they also connect to experiences of landscape, memory, and place.
Nottingham Contemporary describes the exhibition as a meaningful homecoming. It brings Cunningham’s work back to the city where she was born and raised.
In that sense, Midnight Sun closes a circle. It also opens a wider conversation about Cunningham’s place within British painting.
Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun and the Possibilities of Landscape
There is something fitting about bringing Cunningham’s paintings back to Nottingham.
Her work repeatedly transformed landscape into something unstable. She treated landscape as something that could be remembered, imagined, dreamed, or invented. Yet it could never be fully possessed.
Forests became spaces where abstraction and representation could meet. Color and gesture turned painting itself into a form of exploration.
Midnight Sun offers an opportunity to examine that exploration closely.
Cunningham’s death inevitably shapes how we view the exhibition. Yet its significance does not rest solely on what she might have painted in the future. The works she left behind already contain a coherent set of questions.
They ask us to think about nature, imagination, embodiment, darkness, and the possibility of other worlds.
By bringing those paintings back to Nottingham, Nottingham Contemporary presents more than a memorial to a young artist. It offers a substantial reconsideration of a distinctive voice in contemporary British painting.
The Exhibition Publication
A major publication will accompany Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun. It will be the first major publication devoted to the artist’s work.
The book will include new writing and perspectives on Cunningham’s practice. Contributors include Katie Simpson, Hettie Judah, and Niall Ó Faircheallaigh.
Lisson Gallery and The Nixon Collection are supporting the exhibition.
Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun – Exhibition Information
Exhibition: Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun
Venue: Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, Nottingham, NG1 2GB
Dates: 9 October 2026 – 10 January 2027
Curators: Katie Simpson and Niall Ó Faircheallaigh
Admission: Free
The exhibition runs from October 9, 2026, to 10 January 2027. Nottingham Contemporary will present it as the first institutional solo exhibition of Cunningham’s work and the largest presentation of her paintings to date.