CONTEMPORARY DRAWING

Contemporary Art encompasses art produced in the second half of the 20th Century (1960/70) up to the present day. Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art as a whole is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform, organising principle, ideology, or "-ism". Contemporary art is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger contextual frameworks such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, nationality and globalisation. (1)

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In Katherine Stout's book Contemporary Drawing she writes that a resurgence of interest in the practice of drawing coincided with the rise of conceptual and installation art in the 1960's and 70's. Art made during this period interrogated the materiality and function of art, experimenting with unconventional materials and "new media", challenging and transgressing the conventional limits of painting and sculpture. 

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Stout writes "In various guises, drawing offered alternative routes for experimentation, partly due to it's association with 'low' art forms such as comics, advertising, graphic art and caricature, as well as it's usage within fields such as architecture and mathematical or systems analysis. Through adopting styles and techniques from these areas, artists were able to forge new territory for their art. By the late 1960's, as they became increasingly motivated by a wish to let the world in rather than continue to develop art that existed within a separate realm, drawing allowed a means of strengthening the gene pool of art by contaminating it. " (2)