Top 12 Contemporary Drawing Artists You Need To Know

Introduction: What is Contemporary Drawing?

Drawing is the foundation for almost all artists. It is often the first lesson at art school or the starting point in the form of a sketch or a study for a monumental painting, sculpture, or installation. However, today, drawing has conquered its place among the other types of contemporary art as a high art form. Before we take on the top draughtsmen, let’s take on contemporary drawing an sich first.

Contemporary drawing consists of the artistic practice of drawing from roughly 1960/1970 to today, predominantly working on a paper surface using dry media such as graphite, pencil, charcoal, chalk, or wet media such as ink, bister, sepia, markers, pastel or watercolor.

The distinction between painting and drawing can often be fluid, as both art forms work on a two-dimensional surface. However, painting predominantly uses wet media such as oil paint, acrylic paint, or spray paint on canvas, wood, or metal as its surface. For further reading on the subtle differences between painting and drawing, feel free to read our more extensive article titled Explained: Drawing versus Painting.

In any case, many artists switch between these two media. However, several contemporary artists have dedicated their lives entirely to the medium of drawing. As a result, we are pleased to present a reasoned selection of the world’s most influential contemporary drawing artists in this article.

Often, multidisciplinary artists implement drawing into their artistic practice. For instance, Ciprian Muresan uses drawing in his neo-conceptual multimedia practice. However, we have excluded these artists from this list, only selecting artists primarily focusing on contemporary drawing.

For further reading in print on contemporary drawing, we highly recommend the publishing series by Phaidon titled Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing.

12. İnci Eviner

We open our list with a Turkish female visual artist, none other than İnci Eviner. Born in 1956 in Ankara and currently working and residing in Istanbul, Eviner was trained as a painter at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts but has always used the medium of drawing as her starting point.

Her impressive oeuvre, spanning over four decades, is the result of an ongoing exploration of the subject as an entity of change. Her intriguing yet fragile structures of webs of images and mark-making negotiate the imminence of death but also take on the intimate scrutiny of the female body. From her drawing-based practice, she also takes on new media, mimicking the labyrinthine vision of her drawings.[1]

For further reading on İnci Eviner, we strongly recommend the monographic publication Inci Eviner.

11. Jorge Queiroz

Born in 1966 in Lisbon, Portugal, where the artist continues to work and reside, Jorge Queiroz takes on the aforementioned dissolving distinction between painting and drawing and transforms it into a diachronic dialogue of both media. His drawings depict self-fictionalized scenarios marked by personal imaginary elements and intimacy. He develops his own universe, marked by extravagance, the enigma, and even alchemy.

Queiroz’s works do not have narrative linearity, nor are they inhabited by organization or hierarchy. The contemporary artist subverts the figure’s relationship with the background or the interior versus the exterior. The mesmerizing drawings indicate how painting and drawing are intertwined or can contaminate and influence each other.[2]

10. Toyin Ojih Odutola

We open the top ten with Toyin Ojih Odutola, born in 1985 in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and currently residing and working in New York, the United States of America. She is best known for her multimedia drawings in which she explores the malleability of identity and visual storytelling.

It is clear that Ojih Odutola has a strong interest in skin topography. The Nigerian artist has a distinctive mark-making style, using basic drawing materials. Think of pencils, ballpoint pens, charcoal, pastels, and more. Doing so, she achieves a layered visual language in which the composition reinvents and reinterprets the traditions of portraiture, crafting new narratives inspired by art history and popular culture.[3]

For further reading on Toyin Ojih Odutola, we highly recommend the monographic publication Toyin Ojih Odutola: The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi.

9. Sandra Vásquez de la Horra

Born in 1967 in Viña del Mar, Chile, and currently residing and working in Berlin, Germany, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra is best known for her drawings influenced by film, botanical and zoological illustration books or textbooks, but also fairy tales and her personal background. We encounter the influence of Latin-American magic-realist literature, combined with the traditions and myths of her Chilean origins.

She deals with borderline experiences, ghosts, creatures of myth, demons, fear, and death, but also poetry and femininity. In doing so, universal themes such as religion, mythology, the bizarre, and more are a continuum throughout her artistic practice, in which she searches for both personal and universal experiences on paper.[4]

For further reading on Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, we highly recommend the monographic publication Sandra Vásquez de la Horra.