Discover abstract drawings for sale from leading contemporary artists around the world. Rise Art’s carefully curated selection includes a wide variety of abstract drawings available for purchase, from minimal black and white sketches to bold pieces that play with colour. If you’re interested in different types of abstract art, why not take a look at our Abstract Paintings, Abstract Photography or perhaps even some Abstract Sculpture.

ABSTRACT DRAWINGS FROM CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS

Nigel Bird

Abstract drawings can include a stunning variety of styles and philosophies. Explore a world of muted tones and abstract geometry with Nigel Bird, a British artist who uses a unique combination of black pastel, charcoal, Indian ink and soot to create his works. The result is an astonishingly varied body of work that sparks ideas of the natural world through an interesting use of overlapping lines and shapes.

Laura Benetton

If you’re after abstract drawings that make a more colourful statement, then Laura Benetton could be just the artist for you. Her vibrant work has a kind of shattered look, with fragments of colour floating across the canvas. Her piece Cause the pink wasn’t purple conveys a sense of motion through its smeared shapes and lines and is a great example of what Benetton is capable of.

Dai Roberts

Dai Roberts is a British artist who uses simple geometric forms and colours to great effect. His work makes reference to important movements such as the Bauhaus, and there’s a touch of Rothko in some of his works. Roberts’ work demonstrates the power of abstract art to convey a complex message through simple shapes and colours.

ABOUT ABSTRACT DRAWINGS

Leaving the world of figurative art behind, abstract drawings use line, form, colour and shape to create images that bear no resemblance to reality. In historical terms, abstract art is a relatively new invention, having its roots in the 19th century and only truly becoming popular in the 20th century with the rise of movements such as Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism. These movements gave artists greater freedom to produce exactly what they desired, without the constraints of imitation or realism that had previously characterised art. Nowadays, we can understand art in terms of a spectrum of abstraction, with some works tending towards pure abstraction and some introducing more realist elements.

One of the most important creators of abstract drawings was Henri Matisse, a 20th-century French artist whose name has become synonymous with the abstract art movement. Through a mastery of an expressive vocabulary of colour and shape, Matisse managed to create evocative works that conjure up emotions of all kinds. Towards the end of his life, Matisse lost the ability to work with pencil and paint in the same way, and turned towards what he termed ‘drawing with scissors’. He would cut up different coloured pieces of paper and assemble them in a way that resembled his drawings, and these pieces have become some of his most famous.

Find out more in our Guide To Drawings.