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.