Artist Daniel Colen nabs Brooklyn Heights condo

The notable and always provocative artist Daniel Colen, who has shown his work at A-list spaces such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Gagosian Gallery and Saatchi Gallery, has just picked up a new condominium in a swank Brooklyn Heights townhouse.

Colen paid $2.6 million for a four-bedroom duplex located at 71 Pierrepont Street — just around the corner from “Girls” creator Lena Dunham’s pad at 145 Hicks Street. The renovated unit was listed with Phyllis Norton-Towers of Brown Harris Stevens and it features an elevator that opens “directly onto a foyer,” according to the New York Observer.

One of Colen’s most well known pieces is called “Hamster’s Nest” and showed at the Deitch Projects in Soho. The installation piece featured 30 nude volunteers and 2,000 shredded phone books — an idea inspired by “trashing hotel rooms while naked, high on coke, ecstasy or mushrooms,” according to a 2010 interview with Colen in Black Book Magazine. [NYO] –Christopher Cameron