ADAM DANT
Lithograph on Zerkall Butten 150gsm
83·9 × 59·4 cm 
Edition #24 of 25
 
Studying in both London and India gave Dant the sensibility of the chronicler of the historical as well as contemporary world: an observer of our cultural habits. He creates dense, thoroughly researched narrative images that examine and depict contemporary public life, space, mythologies and histories. In the 1990s he acted as an 18th-century style pamphleteer, distributing Donald Parsnips’ Daily Journal. Since then, whether focusing on museums, as in his early series of ‘mockuments’ — flow-chart psycho-histories of institutions, city maps, or individual historical characters and events — Dant’s visual documents have continued to provide a unique insight into the complexities of social, cultural and political experience. Dant’s works camouflage themselves as a wry cartoonish interloper between the historic and the contemporary. 
For the Portfolio Adam has created a black and ‘delft blue’ image which encompasses the history of the world’s first supposed financial bubble into a traditional Dutch interior in the style of a dense contemporary ‘cabinet of curiosities’ — the curiosities within being chronological tales of events from the birth, passage and culmination of ‘Tulip Fever’, depictions of key individuals from tulip history.