Rosalind Barker

British Museum Ref: Albrecht Durer ‘Rhinoceron’ 1515 Drawing and woodcut.

Exhibition at Sevenoaks Kaleidoscope Gallery 2018. Installation view.

Albrecht Durer  ‘Rhinoceron’ is an instantly recognisable iconic, durable image. Forty five thousand copies were made in his lifetime and the 21^stCentury Internet is rife with online booty bearing this woodcut image.

No rhinoceros was available to be seen in early 16^thcentury Europe. People had written descriptions from as early as Plinny the Elder (AD 23-79) in ‘Natural History’. Durer had never seen the animal when he made the works in 1515. He worked from descriptions in letters and oral accounts. Studying the drawing reveals its amalgamation of imaginative marks. The final woodcut while incorrect is a chimera of multiple horns and marks ‘like’ reptiles, shells, bone, scales, etc as described to him.

My ‘Rhinoceros Domesticus’ 2018 is composed of rubbed domestic objects. Each selected for their  ‘likeness’ to the original mark making.

Now 500 years later, future Europeans may only ever imagine this increasingly rare and threatened species.