Artist: Mark Dion
Title: Dante's Bear
One-color lithograph
11 in. X 17 in.
Soft-white Somerset satin paper
Edition of 30
2025
Mark Dion "Dante's Bear" Lithograph
“Dante’s Bear” is a one-color original lithograph by Mark Dion, created in collaboration with Obee Editions. At first glance, the print appears to be a taxonomic illustration, a precise rendering of an American black bear skeleton, drawn in the manner of a 19th-century naturalist study. But Dion subverts this familiar format with a deeply poetic and moral undercurrent. Instead of scientific notations, the skeleton is annotated with inscriptions drawn from Dante’s Inferno, transforming the image into a meditation on sin, nature, and human transgression.
The print was made using a striking reversal technique: rather than printing white on black, Dion and the printers achieved the effect of chalk on a blackboard by printing rich black lithographic ink on soft-white paper. The blackness, luminous and velvety, holds a depth and warmth unique to lithography, allowing the skeletal drawing to emerge with an uncanny brilliance that feels illuminated from within.
In “Dante’s Bear,” Dion collapses the distance between scientific illustration and moral allegory, between the cool gaze of taxonomy and the fiery punishments of the underworld. The bear, an emblem of the natural world’s strength, vulnerability, and innocence, becomes a vessel for reflection on the human impulse to name, classify, and dominate, and the spiritual cost embedded in that pursuit.
The result is a print that is at once hauntingly beautiful and intellectually charged, a contemporary work of natural philosophy rendered through the timeless materiality of lithography.
Mark Dion has received numerous awards, including the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001) The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2007) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucida Art Award (2008) and was a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient in 2019. He has had major exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004); Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2003); Tate Gallery, London (1999), and the British Museum of Natural History in London (2007) .
All materials that come in contact with the print are fully archival. Packaged using rigid boards to assure safe shipping. Ships via FedEx standard flat rate of $42 to anywhere in the US. Request a quote for international shipping. Local pickup is available for free.
