Terry Allen “White Rhino”

White Rhino, etching and aquatint, image 16 3/4 × 24 3/4 inches, sheet size 22 ¼ x 30 inches, edition of 36, 2025.

Flatbed Press proudly announces the 2025 Kollwitz Circle print: White Rhino by Terry Allen.
Each year, Flatbed commissions a special edition exclusively for members of the Kollwitz Circle collector’s group—an opportunity to bring a singular work by a major artist into this intimate annual tradition. For 2025, we are honored to present a new etching by Terry Allen, an artist whose multidisciplinary practice has long woven together storytelling, memory, and myth.

Drawn from a dream, White Rhino unfolds like a visitation—an image that arrives gently and impossibly, hovering between presence and disappearance. Allen etches the massive form of the rhino so lightly it appears to materialize out of mist: a pale silhouette, textured with soft abrasions and nearly erased marks. Across its body drifts a line of text taken directly from the dream itself:

I dreamed I was sitting on the floor with my family… Suddenly a huge white rhino lumbered into the room and laid down beside me… No one could see it but me… I know what it means.

The print becomes a kind of psychic document—part confession, part omen, part memory of something that never happened yet feels deeply true. Allen’s restrained palette and delicate surface handling heighten the sensation that the image is still fading, or perhaps still arriving. The rhino feels both tender and monumental, a private symbol made visible just long enough to be shared.

With White Rhino, Allen extends his lifelong exploration of narrative, the subconscious, and the shadows where humor, fear, and revelation mingle. This edition stands as a rare and intimate offering to the Kollwitz Circle: a dream given form, a quiet warning, and a reminder of the unseen forces that move beside us.