Ron Mueck

Ron Mueck, the hyperrealist sculptor, learned his craft making models and puppets for television and movies. He was nearly 40 when his work came to the attention of Charles Saatchi. At Saatchi's urging, he began to show his sculptures in gallery and museum contexts in the late 1990s. They met with astonishment and praise, particularly Dead Dad, a silicon and mixed-media model of Mueck's father's body, perfectly proportioned but less than four feet long, which made its debut at the highly publicized Sensation show. The human presence and perfection of detail in Mueck's work, the realism and mysterious, transfigured quality of his figures, which stems in part from his extravagant liberties with scale, excited immediate international attention. Since then, the artist's fame has increased steadily with each new work. This second, expanded edition of the monograph of record updates the only comprehensive publication on Mueck's work. Bastian's catalogue raisonne lists all of his works to date.

Visitors to the 2001 Venice Biennale were highly impressed with the sculpture Boy--a child who stood five meters high--by the London-based artist Ron Mueck. Harald Szeemann called the sculpture "the sphinx of the exhibition," and it soon became its landmark. The monumental, crouching figure of a youth makes a vulnerable, defensive impression and yet, its watchful eye seems to miss nothing. Mueck's human figures are always technically perfect, absolutely realistic, deliberately undersized or oversized. He first models them in clay and then takes a hollow cast which he fills with silicone or fiberglass. The finished sculptures show delicate networks of veins, fine hairs; they even seem to breathe. Their perfection is always in the service of content, however: Viewers are touched and set thinking by the emotional quality of figures like Pregnant Woman or Dead Dad--created by the artist after the death of his father. With great autonomous presence, exhibiting human features yet completely artificial, Mueck's artworks refer to fundamental questions and allow a wealth of associations.

Ron Mueck has always employed scale with psychological intent, creating uncannily life-like sculptures that are never actually life size. The life of "Boy," his largest sculpture yet with a bulk of roughly 16 feet, is documented here in photographs that reveal his eight-month-long gestation period in a London warehouse and his piecemeal journey by boat to the Venice Biennale.