Artists I'm Looking at: Ron Mueck

Of all the contemporary figurative sculptors in the world, I'd have to say that Ron Mueck is my favorite... His attention to detail is amazing and his use of scale is incredible.

This is the first piece of his work I saw and was blown away by it...not just because of the size and detail, but because it took him about a month to finish this piece from start to finish...which is both incredible and insane:

Untitled (Big Man), 2000

This piece is also amazing...she is over 8 feet tall....:

Pregnant Woman, 2002

Here's a 2 part video about how he made her...le sigh:





This piece was at the Brooklyn Art Museum a few years ago and was stunning...

A Girl, 2006

From Wikipedia:

Ron Mueck (born 1958) is an Australian hyperrealist sculptor working in Great Britain.

Mueck's early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children's television and films, notably the film Labyrinth for which he also contributed the voice of Ludo, and the Jim Henson series The Storyteller.

Mueck moved on to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. Although highly detailed, these props were usually designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side. Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures which looked perfect from all angles.

In 1996 Mueck transitioned to fine art, collaborating with his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, to produce small figures as part of a tableau she was showing at the Hayward Gallery. Rego introduced him to Charles Saatchi who was immediately impressed and started to collect and commission work. This led to the piece which made Mueck's name, Dead Dad, being included in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy the following year. Dead Dad is a rather haunting silicone and mixed media sculpture of the corpse of Mueck's father reduced to about two thirds of its natural scale. It is the only work of Mueck's that uses his own hair for the finished product.

Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. His five metre high sculpture Boy 1999 was a feature in the Millennium Dome and later exhibited in the Venice Biennale.

In 1999 Mueck was appointed as Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London. During this two year post he created the works Mother and Child, Pregnant Woman, Man in a Boat and Swaddled Baby.^[1]