Published in 2006, "Noses & Ears, Etc.: Face with Nose and (Green) Ear" is constructed from screen-printed elements that have been hand cut and mounted onto Sintra board. The resulting work sits somewhere between printmaking, collage, and relief sculpture. Rather than depicting a complete portrait, Baldessari reduces the human profile to a handful of forms: a sculptural nose, a vivid turquoise ear, and broad planes of saturated color that define the contours of a face. The viewer instinctively reconstructs the absent figure from these isolated fragments, demonstrating Baldessari's enduring fascination with the ways perception allows us to derive meaning from abstraction.

"Thinking about art history, it seems that lips and eyeballs have been getting a lot of attention, but I haven't seen many examples of ears and noses. I suppose they just don't separate very well. I mean, floating eyeballs and lips seems to work okay, but not noses and ears, so I decided to free the nose and ear."
—John Baldessari