A Very Attractive Rhino by Urs Fischer

Rhinos are about to go extinct in the wild. The only place you or your children will be able to see them will be in zoos, or in images. This tragedy is entirely human caused, due to intensive poaching, hunting, and habitat loss. The rhinoceros is still a mighty beast, however. The scale and impressiveness of this megafauna is on full display in Urs Fischer’s Things, a full-size metallic sculpture on display in an unused bank in midtown Manhattan. The rhino’s magnetic appeal has captured a slew of manmade items around it, including chairs, a table, and a full-size copy machine. The result is a sculpture of staggering size and impact, something bold and memorable, tinged with sadness over the subject’s fate. Art should provoke and inspire like this. Via Colossal:

Via the gallery’s website:

Amid the bustle of midtown Manhattan, a rhinoceros can be glimpsed through tall, arched windows at street level. Various man-made objects—including a copy machine, a car door, a handbag, a vacuum cleaner, a shovel, and a table—seem to float right through the creature, as if released from Earth’s gravitational pull. Carved out of aluminum, this barrage of incongruous items forms a single, continuous unit, anchored by the rhinoceros, which stands its ground. Produced at life size from a 3D scan of a taxidermy animal, its furrowed visage looms from a height of more than ten feet.

Things considers the ways that objects and forces—from plastic bottles and Wi-Fi signals to memories, history, and emotion—gather around and pass through our bodies as we move through the world, creating countless versions of reality that are specific to each of us. Like the rhinoceros, we absorb all that comes into our vicinity, and in the process we ourselves undergo a constant, often undetectable metamorphosis. Existence itself is thus presented as an accumulation, a collective gathering of physical and metaphorical baggage.