Keith Cunningham produced a body of abstract works that reveals his deep engagement with form, material and process. A relatively small number of images, they nevertheless are an important reflection of his early training and parallel work as a graphic designer. Cunningham deeply understood the power of abstraction to simplify shapes and highlight formal details. In his oil paintings, blots of contrasting colours are evocative of organic forms, combining a variety of textures and pigments. His mixed media works on paper, ranging from sharp, bold designs generating three-dimensional compositions to gestural forms produced in rough acrylics, show the artist’s confidence with spatial and aesthetic experimentation. Even more daring visual strategies are employed in Cunningham’s drawings, which are impressing for their spontaneous linearity.

Some works faintly evoke natural, biomorphic forms borrowed from his graphic or architectonic designs. In other instances, abstracted drawings constitute a means to simplify or schematise larger or more complex figurations, to an extent that they are no longer recognisable. In Cunningham’s abstract artworks, line and form become both structure and gesture, shifting between control and spontaneity. The graphic language he developed in these works reflects a focused attention to the act of mark-making, where each stroke seems to oscillate between the deliberate and the intuitive. As a skilled graphic designer and fully realised artist, Cunningham understood abstraction not as an aesthetic end, but as a method for probing deeper realities.