Airplane Drawings For Sale

Browse airplane drawings for sale in our online gallery’s selection of contemporary artworks. Shop airplane drawings today to find the perfect piece to complete your home or office. Explore the artwork from our curated selection of international contemporary artists to discover the machine’s shifting symbolism in art.

Airplane Drawings as Symbols of War

Throughout history, airplanes have absorbed different symbolism as their role in society shifts – from an emblem of war and masculinity to an image of freedom and technology-inspired utopia.

During World War II, artist Paul Nash substituted humans for planes, portraying the machines as the conflict’s central characters. To him, they were “beautiful monsters” and he worked surrounded by photographs of aircraft parts. Images of wrecked German aircraft lying discarded at a dump near Oxford inspired him to create the 1940 artwork Totes Meer or “Dead Sea” in which he depicted a graveyard of old aircraft bathed in melancholy moonlight, with the planes acting as a replacements for the soldiers who,like the planes, were lying in graves across Europe.

Twenty-three years later, pop-artist Roy Lichtenstein subverted the idea of planes as a symbol for war with his famous Whaam!. The pilot is seen saying ‘I pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the sky…’ before he is engulfed in a fiery crash. “At that time, I was interested in anything I could use as a subject that was emotionally strong – usually love, war, or something that was highly-charged and emotional subject matter,” said Lichtenstein of the artwork. “Also, I wanted the subject matter to be opposite to the removed and deliberate painting techniques.” Through his heavy references to comic strips and advertising, Lichtenstein’s airplane artwork is turned into what art critic Alastair Sooke has described as “a tongue-in-cheek male daydream of aggression, conquest and ejaculatory release”.

As the memory of war melted into history, artist Wolfgang Tillmans recast the airplane as a nod to freedom in the 1990s. In his book Concorde, he included sixty-two photographs of the Concorde supersonic passenger plane that was operated between 1969 and 2003. In his images, Tillmans’ Concorde becomes a shapeshifter, at times resembling a bird or a paper airplane and at other times the machinery melts into the haze at the horizon. For Tillmans, the Concorde was “the last example of a techno-utopian invention from the sixties… when technology and progress was the answer to everything and the sky was no longer a limit.” Yet he also calls the airplane “an environmental nightmare” in a premonition of how today’s climate movement positions airplanes as a culprit – a point of view that is likely to leak into art.

Find out more in our Guide To Drawings.