This piece is part of one of the most striking projects Banksy carried out in London in August 2024. Starting on 5 August, over nine days, the artist left a new animal figure in a different part of the city every day and announced each one on his Instagram account, without giving away the location. For days, the city turned into a kind of chase, with everyone talking about where the next animal would appear.

The rhino was the eighth in this series of nine. It appeared on 12 August 2024 in Charlton, in south east London, on Westmoor Street.

The intelligence of this piece lies in the fact that it does not stand alone on the wall. Banksy stencilled the rhino directly behind a scrapped Nissan Micra parked in front of the wall. The angle was set up so precisely that the rhino appeared to be mounting the car. On top of that, an orange traffic cone placed on the car’s bonnet lined up exactly where the rhino’s horn should be. Half of the composition, in other words, was made of paint, and half of it was made from objects that were already sitting on the street.

The scene itself works on several levels. A rhino mounting a car clearly nods to mating behaviour in the animal world, which gives it a comic edge. But the same image can also be read as nature returning to, or even taking over, urban space. Banksy gave no official statement about the series as a whole, so the interpretation was left entirely to the viewer.

The piece had a short life. Hours after it appeared, someone tagged it with white spray paint, and by the next morning the car that made up half the composition had been removed from the area. A protective barrier was later put up for the stencil on the wall, but the integrity of the piece, that joke between the rhino and the car, could not be restored.

This rapid decay was a pattern that repeated across the whole series. The wolf in Peckham was stolen the same day it appeared. The giant cat in Cricklewood was removed for security reasons. Banksy’s nine day zoo fell apart as fast as it had appeared.

Rhino is a textbook example of Banksy’s ability to use the street not as a canvas, but as a stage. The paint itself is extremely simple. What makes the piece is the fact that a scrapped car and a traffic cone suddenly became part of the composition.