London-based Australian sculptor Ron Mueck is known for his hyper-real figurative sculptures that experiment with scale and detail to speak to psychological human experiences such as alienation, intimacy, and vulnerability.
Read MoreBorn in Melbourne to German parents, Mueck spent his formative years working in various roles, including as a puppeteer, model maker, and special effects technician in the television, film, and advertising industries. His familial connection to painter Paula Rego, his mother-in-law, is often considered to be an influence in the artist's practice.
Mueck moved to London in 1986. He rose to international prominence following the inclusion of Dead Dad (1996—1997) in the exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists (1997) at London's Royal Academy of Arts.
Ron Mueck's sculptures are distinct for their meticulous realism and attention to facial expressions and bodily features. Typically presented nude or minimally adorned with simple clothing or bedding, Mueck's figures are often depicted at pivotal moments in life, such as birth, death, or motherhood. Exaggerated distortions of scale place the viewer in an unfamiliar spatial relation to the work, as they are confronted with a vast spectrum of emotions within the human experience.
Mueck's sculptures are developed through an intensive process that can take over a year to result in the finished work. Beginning with preparatory sketches, the artist then creates clay or plaster maquettes, which are cast in silicone for further refining. The final outcome, usually rendered in mixed media with fibreglass resin, reflects the care invested into every hair, wrinkle, and pore in Mueck's anatomically accurate works.
The artist's personal life was brought into his practice through Dead Dad (1996—1997), a small-scale, realistic rendering of Mueck's naked father lying flat, as though on a mortuary table. Dead Dad poignantly examines loss and familial bonds, with the smaller-than-life scale zeroing in on the subject of the artist's grief.
Mueck's ability to empathically animate tensions between bodily presence and psychological interiority is further demonstrated in works such as In Bed (2005), a monumental sculpture of a woman staring pensively into the distance from her bed in a familiar scene of reflective domesticity. A Girl (2006) contemplates the miracle of birth through a jarringly realistic naked newborn baby measuring over five metres long.
Later works have demonstrated a subtle shift away from the hyper-realistic nude figuration upon which Mueck has based much of his practice. The giant cast-iron skull Dead Weight (2021) reveals surface imperfections and reduced detail in a grandiose representation of death, while Woman with Shopping (2013) depicts a tired-looking woman captured mid-errand with a newborn baby tucked into the front of her coat.
Curator Andrea Karnes has stated: 'Drawing upon memory and reality, Mueck's lifelike sculptures are instantly relatable on a human level. ... Yet Mueck's calculated shifts in scale throw us off by adding an element of ambiguity between reality and artifice.'
Ron Mueck has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions internationally since the 1990s.
Significant exhibitions include Ron Mueck: 25 Years of Sculpture 1996—2021, Thaddaeus Ropac, London (2021); New Works, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2018); NGC@WAG, Winnipeg Art Gallery (2015); Ron Mueck: Sculpture, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2002); Plateau of Humankind, 49th Venice Biennale (2001); among others.
Mueck's works are held in major international collections, including at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; Christchurch Art Gallery; Towada Art Center; Tate, London; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Ocula | 2022
