The idea of transcendence is at the heart of her work: traversing her own body, crossing the boundaries of imagination, gender or identity out of apparent chaos and inherently risky curiosity. Without dissociating herself from surrealism, Tanning has used a particular set of metaphors in her work to explore what she describes as unknown but tangible states, refusing to confine herself within her limits. For Dorothea Tanning, 1972 was a year of exploration of the medium of sculpture. However, she did not abandon drawing and painting for all that.

"Very Large Drawing" is proof of this. In a period normally dominated by a gradual shift towards the abstract, the artist returns to a light figurative style for the duration of one work. Against a neutral background, characters whose identity is not clearly identifiable dance on the paper. Each of them takes no notice of the others, as if they were in their own bubble, in the manner of a comic strip: chimerical creatures, monsters or fairytale characters, give us the artistic vocabulary to express our unconscious.