CONTEMPORARY

Contemporary artists continue to explore in their drawings ideas about sexuality, gender, race, and power. Missionary Position II by Sonia Boyce OBE (b. 1962), for example, reflects on British society in the 1980s and conflicting opinions about religious beliefs across generations and cultures. Many artists also consider the act of drawing itself, sometimes testing its boundaries. Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) employs drawing in combination with other techniques and a range of media. Jenny Saville (b. 1970), in the drawing shown here, draws into a reproduction of a cartoon by Leonardo da Vinci. Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) called a recent show of drawings based on tracings of slides of photographs, “Lines which do not exist”. William Kentridge (b. 1955) employs different media and techniques to superimpose images and words onto the pages of old books.