A group exhibition looking at drawings of the body exposed has opened at the Drawing Room, London.

The Nakeds takes as its starting point selected drawings of the single figure by Egon Schiele. From here it considers work by artists from the post-war period to the present day.

“The naked body is frequently the physical terrain artists traverse in search of the inner self. How to represent love, shame, solitude and sexual yearning? Drawing from the self or life model, from reproduction or the imagination, has provided artists with the freedom to explore desires, fears and fantasies.

The Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890 – 1918) was a prolific and provocative draughtsman. His drawings of the body unclothed or in a state of undress are amongst the most arresting works to have emerged from Vienna in the tumultuous years around the First World War. Working at the same time as Sigmund Freud, in the birthplace of modern psychiatry, the artist was attacked and acclaimed in his short lifetime.

Still dividing opinion today, his drawings tested long-held distinctions between the ‘nude’ and the ‘naked’, art and pornography. The exhibition seeks to explore this contested terrain.”

Egon Schiele, Zwei Freundinnen

Egon Schiele, Standing Nude with Stockings, 1910

Maria Lassnig, Woman in the Bed, 2002

Stewart Helm, The line and the lust, 2011

Alina Szapochnikow, Bust-Length Figure of a Woman, Headless 2, c.1971

George Condo, Nude Study (i), 2007

Joseph Beuys, Girl with Apple, 1954

Rosemarie Trockel, I feel something, 1995

Other artists in the exhibition include David Austen, Fiona Banner, Louise Bourgeois, Enrico David, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Leon Golub, Chantal Joffe, Paul McCarthy, Chris Ofili, Carol Rama, Nancy Spero, Georgina Starr, Nicola Tyson, Andy Warhol and Franz West.