5 Contemporary Drawing Artists You Should Know

Drawing was once relegated to a role as the mere preliminary step in the artistic process. Now it has flourished beyond its traditional role to become an independent art form. Yet contemporary artists who specialize in drawing are often regarded as having made an unconventional, if not eccentric choice.

“Things that are eccentric are by definition ‘outside the center’—outside long-established norms and all things regarded as self-evident, on the beaten path,” Olga Tokarczuk writes in her Eccentricity As Feminism essay in The Paris Review. “To be eccentric is to view the world from a completely different perspective, one that is both provincial and marginal—pushed aside to the fringes—and at the same time revelatory and revolutionary.”

To be a contemporary drawing artist means choosing this road less traveled, resisting the temptation to devote one’s time to more commercial and “respectable” kinds of art such as oil on canvas.

Taking inspiration from Tokarczuk, I invite you to travel with me off the beaten path, meet the “revelatory and revolutionary” contemporary drawing artists, and celebrate the mastery of their visions.

1. Chloe Piene

Like Charles Baudelaire’s poem Carcass, the drawings of Chloe Piene (b. 1972 in Stamford, CT, USA) convey both repulsion and desire. The lines in Piene’s drawings are nothing short of masterful. Her fabulous trajectory of exhibitions featuring the Albertina in Vienna, MoMA in New York City, and Szydłowski Gallery in Warsaw (where the artist resides and works), are at the same time prestigious and intriguing. Piene’s drawings are powerful and emotionally charged compositions that float like ethereal figures without a horizon. Her gestural strokes create dividing lines, marks, and wounds—both forensically accurate and intuitive in its impact.

Displaying an interest in anatomy, Chloe Piene uses her pencil like a scalpel, dissecting and exposing her subjects in their raw unfiltered state. Piene’s work, compared to that of Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, and Alberto Giacometti, portrays the unchoreographed dance between Eros and Thanatos, using the line to evoke a sense of visceral tension and vulnerability. Her fascination with eroticism, death, and decay lingers in the background, pushing us into the role of a voyeur who contemplates the paradoxes of the human condition.

You can view Chloe Piene’s works on her website and Instagram.

2. Maess Anand

In her series Abnormal Results, Maess Anand (b. 1982, Warsaw, Poland) creates a powerful collision of art and science. The artist uses drawings in pen and marker on paper to address the biological processes of cancer in a place where art, health care, and feelings, and facts coexist.

Anand’s works are drawn by hand, which unavoidably incorporates the element of aesthetics and makes her drawings reminiscent of the work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience. Ramón y Cajal drew accurate depictions of neural networks that also happened to be stunningly beautiful. But while Cajal’s goal was to depict reality, Anand endeavors to analyze it. Using Kaplan-Meier survival curves and cancer-related tweets, she builds what anthropologist Paul Rabinow defines as biosocial space that utilizes statistical and computational analysis to investigate existence.

However, data graphics is not used by the artist in a positivist way, which holds that knowledge is derived from sensory experience through reason and logic and aims to legitimize scientific study. Instead, Maess Anand transforms data into narrative.

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag warned against loving or fearing the corpse through metaphorical language. As such Anand’s drawings are not figurative for pain and endurance and resist aestheticization, they are pictures of cancer as it is—something horrifying and mundane at the same time, that blurs the distinction between the personal and the communal.

Unlike other representations of ill-health, such as Alina Szapocznikow’s diseased body sculptures, Anand work is a retreat inward. It subverts the output of science to visualize the unseen and to create a new language, which conveys the narrative of both the clinician and the patient, combining medical imaging with the intimacy of a hand gesture. Maess Anand has presented work among others at the Drawing Center in New York, and Wroclaw Contemporary Museum and has been the recipient of fellowships at Yaddo, Residency Unlimited, and ISCP in New York. You can explore Anand’s works on her website and Instagram.

3. Azita Moradkhani

Having grown up in Tehran, Iran, Azita Moradkhani’s (b. 1985) work is strongly influenced by Persian politics, art, and culture. Her art focuses on how competing social conventions affect the female body. The artist is another alumna of prestigious Yaddo and current resident at International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York, where she currently lives. Moradkhani is interested in examining the experience of personal insecurity and the dynamics of vulnerability and violence.

At first glance, her drawings appear to be illustrations or even advertisements for women’s lingerie, trivial exercises in decoration with nothing underneath. A second look reveals a body of work filled with discordant and unforeseen elements, a darker subject matter that catches the audience off guard with its unexpected and brutal force. We see a gun, mass protests, and fragmented bodies. Harsh reality pierces through the veneer of superficial beauty revealing uncomfortable truths.

One could apply Robert Schumann’s description of his contemporary Frédéric Chopin, “cannons concealed within flowers,” to Moradhkani’s work—a clash of aesthetics and conceptual content that emphasizes the marks of history and memory on the female body and its coverings. The dichotomy within the work serves as a socio-cultural commentary on Eastern and Western gender norms and how even the West’s far more liberal standards contribute to suffering and the unequal treatment of women.

Azita Moradkhani has exhibited work at Jane Lombard Gallery in New York, Royal Academy of Arts, in the UK, and has been the recipient of a fellowship at the Assets for Artists program at MASS MoCA. You can view her works on her website and Instagram.

4. Keita Mori

When Keita Mori’s (b. 1981 in Hokkaido, Japan) teacher encouraged him to work with only one material, he chose the medium of thread for his artistic expression.¹ The choice was inspired by Félix Gonzáles-Torres’ floating curtain works. Mori’s work evolved from threads suspended in the air to threads flattened on the floor. Arranging the threads on the floor gave the impression of a precise pattern, which prompted Mori to glue them directly to the floor.

Mori creates drawings by pulling and fixing the thread with a hot glue gun, producing works that oscillate between two and three dimensions. His Bug Report echoes Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 work Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 in its dynamic exploration of movement and fragmented forms. At the same time, Keita Mori’s visual results create an interesting parallel to the creations of his peers across the pond: Toronto’s Keli Safia Maksud (b. 1985) and New York’s Ronny Quevedo (b. 1981). Keita Mori’s work is mainly shown in France and Japan, including Drawing Lab, Paris, Galerie Catherine Putman, Paris, and Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Aomori.

Keita Mori takes the term bug from computer science, specifically the error message that we see on the computer screen. Mori’s works seem to be complex interweaving threads that use repetition to create an intricate modern architecture that is perfect. Yet the thread used is imperfect, the structure flawed—a parallel to contemporary society.
You can explore more works by Keita Mori on his website and Instagram.

5. Naudline Pierre

Naudline Pierre (b. 1989 in Leominster, MA, USA) draws upon religion and art history, but rather than replicating existing themes, she infuses them with personal concerns. By replacing the white figures of classical biblical portraiture with Black female subjects, Pierre masterfully plays with the legacy of the Western canon and pushes these associations to their limits. Currently residing in Brooklyn, the artists had her work included in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, James Cohan, New York, Perrotin, Seoul, and the Drawing Center, New York.

Pierre’s formative years in a Christian Protestant environment placed paramount importance on prophecies and the impending apocalypse. Her work is significantly marked by this upbringing. Pierre’s preoccupation with Christian iconography and religious topics makes her an outlier among her contemporaries. Pierre’s creations remind me of the paintings of Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known to the world as El Greco.

Her work is filled with a parade of angels, prophesies, and ascensions, a microcosm of Christian religious references, and possesses the same otherworldly quality as the paintings of the old master. Pierre leverages her remarkable ability to bend perspective and composition to align with her often subversive visions, using religious vocabulary in a novel way.

If you want to explore more works by Naudline Pierre, check her website and Instagram.

Author’s bio:

Marta Sawicka (b. 1999) is an investment management analyst by day, and an aspiring art writer by night. Loves to discover new patterns and connections that are being formed in the contemporary art world.