An intelligent and beautifully illustrated survey
of contemporary artists who place two timeless
creative preoccupations – drawing and the human
form – at the heart of their practice.
Drawing People
The Human Figure in Contemporary Art
Roger Malbert
318 illustrations, 246 in colour
34.0 x 24.0cm
256pp
ISBN 978 0 500 291634
Flexibound
£29.95
April
A4
Book
ContentS
Introduction: A Universal Language
1. Body
2. Self
3. Personal Lives
4. Social Reality
5. Fictions
Drawing People
m ar k e t i n g pla n
• Email to approx. 83 tutors of contemporary art
• approx. 1000 tutors of art history in colleges
and universities across the UK.
• (Other titles such as Human Anatomy, Body Art and The
Body in Contemporary Art to be included in the mailing,
depending on stock levels).
• May also be able to feature this title in special marketing
to teachers via the OCR exam board.
• We will also aim to be promoting through the online
audiences of
-The Drawing Room
-The House of Illustration
Drawing People
1
body
There is only convention in the ‘realistic’ depiction of the body. The body depicted always tends
towards exaggeration, either in the convention of the grotesque or the convention of the ideal.
There are few images less interesting than an exact anatomical drawing of the human form.
This problem arises from the corresponding problem of the absence of stance. Grotesque realism
is emblematic of the body’s knowledge of itself, a knowledge of pieces and parts, of disassociated
limbs and an absent centre. The realism of the ideal is emblematic of the body’s knowledge of the
other, a knowledge of facades, of two dimensions. Only in the embrace is the other’s body known
as one’s own, in parts. Perhaps this is why the grotesque has become the domain of lived sexuality,
while the ideal has tended toward the domain of the voyeur and the pornographer.
s u s a n s t e wa r t
On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 1984
if it is true that no depiction of the body, to be interesting,
and the internet, it may seem quaintly irrelevant to consider
can ever be entirely neutral and objective in the way that
the dangerous implications of drawing the body, as if anything
a depiction of a chair or a bicycle might be, then the body
were still at stake. Can a drawing shock? There is no drawing
must be a uniquely revealing subject, telling us more about
that can compete for transgression with the most banal
the sensibility, beliefs, motives and passions of the artist
pornographic image. yet there are things that a drawing can
than any other. what does it mean to draw the body in the
convey that are beyond the reach of photography and digital
twenty-first century? The opposition that Susan Stewart
media – just as there is no substitute for a handshake or a kiss.
describes between classical idealism and grotesque realism
is a fundamental dialectic in the history of modern art. The
with Stewart’s argument as a point of departure, this chapter
drawn or painted image of the naked body was the locus of
examines the ways in which contemporary artists’ drawings
aesthetic struggle – formal and ideological – from picasso
can express ‘the body’s knowledge of itself ’ as distinct
and matisse’s revolutionary nudes of 1907 until academic
from – and often in opposition to – the classical tradition of
painting went under in the latter half of the twentieth century.
objectification. historically, the concept of grotesque realism
how to envisage the human form in contemporary times?
derives from literary criticism, but it is easily applicable to
religion might have a say in that, if humanity is made in god’s
visual art, where the contrast between classical ideals and
likeness, or indeed if any representation of the human image
low alternative genres, such as caricature and carnival, is
is forbidden. on the other hand, in the age of photography
immediately discernible in representations of the body. The
< l O u i S e B O u r g e O i S The Feeding, 2007
gouache on paper, 60 × 45.7 cm (23 5/8 × 18 in.)
27
body
40
eD Pien
Ad Infinitum, 2010
ink, Flashe and collage on sectioned paper
197 × 392 cm (77 1/2 × 154 3/8 in.)
Marlene DuMaS
Born 1953, Cape Town, South Africa. Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
self
Marlene Dumas has drawn and painted many
portraits, faces looking straight ahead and set
against blank backgrounds like ID mugshots, each
on a separate sheet of paper or canvas. Often these
portraits are grouped together, stacked or lined up,
suggesting an identity parade or an institutional
system for ‘processing’ individuals. Dumas has
depicted psychiatric patients, fashion models and
76
black people in this way, with an acute sensitivity to
the singularity of each face, its unique character and
expression, as well as to the politics associated with
grouping faces by social or racial type.
The faces in the series shown here – a group of men
Marlene DuMaS
of Middle Eastern appearance – were drawn directly
from news photographs and personal snapshots,
and mix suicide bombers and jihadists with ordinary
young men living in the artist’s neighbourhood in
Amsterdam. Deliberately uncaptioned, the drawings
remind us how difficult it is to distinguish mass
murderers from regular citizens. Our emotional
response to a face is irrational; stereotypes are
easily conjured up by the media, which aims to
thrill and frighten as much as to inform. Dumas’s
drawings restore humanity to faces that are
regularly objectified and even demonized in
news photographs. Further, and perhaps more
controversially, they highlight the way that media
demonization can also lead to peaceful citizens
being mistaken for violent ones. In the context of
these drawings, however, Dumas’s fluent, sensuous
brushstrokes soften the features, eliciting empathy
without discrimination.
(this page, opposite and pages 78–79) Young Men, 2002–5
Series of 12 drawings, ink on paper
each: 54 × 53 cm (21 1/4 × 20 7/8 in.)
personal lives
128
V i r g i n i a c h i h O ta
sarudzo (choice), 2011
Pen and ink drawing on paper
21 × 15 cm (8 1/4 × 5 7/8 in.)
ndombundira chokwadi chandinoziva (I embrace the truth I know)
2011 >
Pen and ink drawing on paper
21 × 15 cm (8 1/4 × 5 7/8 in.)
social realit y
174
c h e n S h aO X i O n g
Dr laKra
Born 1972, Mexico City, Mexico. Lives and works in Oaxaca, Mexico
Dr Lakra (Jerónimo López Ramirez) straddles high
and low culture with unique aplomb. His father is
fictions
an eminent Mexican painter and his mother a poet
and anthropologist. He took up tattooing at the age
of sixteen and acquired his pseudonym from the
doctor’s briefcase in which he carried his equipment;
‘Lacra’ means scar or blemish in Spanish and is
also slang for delinquent. Dr Lakra continues to
practise as a tattooist while also exhibiting his work
in museums and galleries across the world. The
content and style of his drawings in both spheres
are more or less identical: ‘I’ve always drawn,’ he
says, ‘sometimes on skin, sometimes on paper.’
230
His best-known works on paper are his ink-drawn
interventions on vintage postcards and photographs
from popular Mexican magazines – pin-ups and
wrestlers he embellishes with spiders, skulls and
demons, redolent of the imagery of the Mexican
Day of the Dead. These diabolical and carnivalesque
Dr laKra
visions occasionally spill out onto the gallery wall in
Dr Lakra’s more complex compositions.
Pedorra (She Who Farts), 2003
ink and paint on vintage magazine
36 × 17 cm (14 1/8 × 6 3/4 in.)
Puños (Punch), 2003 >
ink and paint on vintage magazine
26 × 19 cm (10 1/4 × 7 1/2 in.)
Drawing People
ISBN 978 0 500 291634
£29.95 flexibound