Studio Pottery Sculpture Rhinoceros — signed "Mosset", French grès, studio pottery 1970s/80s

Monumental rhinoceros sculpture made of French grès, hand-built in the workshop period of the 1970s/80s and marked on one of the four legs with the black handwritten signature "Mosset" — an attribution that refers to the pottery village of Mosset in Conflent in the Pyrénées-Orientales at the foot of the Canigou, which has been known for its grès workshops for decades. The massive animal body is constructed from thick stoneware using slab technique and modeled in a very expressive brutalist formal language: the back bears an erected ridge of layered scale plates, the flanks are transformed into a restless, bark-like skin with long, sharp tool notches and scratched lines, the forward-extending horn with a pointed end even bears fine carved ridges. The dark blue-black ash glaze with metallic shimmering reflections lies densely over the grès-typical sandstone core, which shines through in a warm ochre on the unglazed foot surfaces — a strong material contrast that makes the haptics of the sculpture immediately palpable.

With a length of 51 cm, a depth of 19.5 cm, a height of 20 cm, and a weight of around 5 kg, the sculpture is a monumental object that immediately defines the space — very present on a console, a sideboard, a mantelpiece, or as a sculptural anchor point for a bookshelf. The four legs are hollow due to their construction, the center of the base and the foot openings clearly show the unglazed grès shard — a structural feature typical for large-format studio ceramic animals, which makes crack-free drying and high-firing possible. Very good original condition: no chips, no repaired breaks, the signature clearly preserved, the dark ash glaze with its deep metallic shimmer intact. An exceptional collector's and interior piece in the tradition of French animalier studio ceramics of the 1970s and 80s, in which workshops like La Borne, Dieulefit, Vallauris, and the small potteries of the Pyrénées-Orientales developed brutalist animal depiction as an independent sculptural genre.