Details

Title

Dante's Noses

Artist/Maker

Ben Roosevelt (American, born 1975)

Date

2012

Medium

Pencil on paper

Dimensions

6 3/8 x 7 3/8 inches

Credit

Purchase with the Lambert Fund and gift of Laurence S. Leopold

Accession #

2012.157

Location

Currently not on view

These four drawings were first presented as part of an installation entitled The Blue Flame. Roosevelt recreated a bar, The Blue Flame, from a dream he had in which he was visited by historical figures whom the artist sees as important to his own artistic output—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dante, Iggy Pop, and Joseph Beuys. Playing with the dream-state in which the artist first encountered these figures, each is represented simply by a single feature in multiple. A riff on the Surrealist practice of the Exquisite Corpse, the individual features—Dante’s nose, Beuys’s eyes, Pop’s lips, and Coleridge’s hair—can be combined in innumerable combinations to create a complete portrait, perhaps of the artist himself.

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