Ever since his poignant sculpture of his dead father’s small, naked, vulnerable body (Dead Dad 1996-7) caused such awe and admiration in the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in London in 1997, Ron Mueck’s work has come to epitomise a renewed interest among artists in a hyper-realistic sculptural representation of the human body. His work concentrates almost exclusively on the human figure, tracing our passage through life from birth to death. All his sculptures are made with an obsessive attention to realism, right down to the pores in the skin and the hair on the body. Mueck’s sculptures are so realistic that people find it hard to believe at first sight that they are not real.
Ron Mueck was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1958, but has lived in London for over 20 years now. He honed his extraordinary skills in making life-like figures during several years in film and television. He worked on the Muppets and was responsible for the special effects in David Bowie’s film Labyrinth.
This show in the Royal Scottish Academy Building will include the five recent sculptures that Mueck showed last winter in Paris, attracting both rave reviews and over 100,000 visitors. There will also be a newly commissioned work of a giant baby lying on the floor, as well as four important earlier sculptures.
Ron Mueck is a collaboration between the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Foundation Cartier in Paris, as well as the Aros Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
