Australian-born British artist Ron Mueck makes creepy-looking and realistic human figures.
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Ron Mueck: bigger than Monet?
(Filed: 15/08/2006)
The startlingly realistic figures in Ron Mueck's first Scottish exhibition are drawing huge crowds. Serena Davies sizes up an acute observer of modern life
In 2001, the art dealer Anthony d'Offay suddenly closed his hugely successful London gallery. At one swoop he dissolved the most magnificent stable of contemporary artists in Britain - Gilbert and George, Anselm Keifer, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, to name just a few giants of the art scene. And, from all these, there was a single artist d'Offay chose to continue to represent: Ron Mueck.
Leaving aside d'Offay's artistic acumen, the man is a brilliant businessman. The Royal Scottish Academy building now teems with crowds on the occasion of Scotland's first Ron Mueck exhibition. The show is a great hit. It looks likely to equal the record set by the most popular exhibition in the history of the National Galleries of Scotland, their 2003 Monet exhibition. It has already proved a triumphant vindication of the edgier regime promised by the National Galleries' new director-general, John Leighton. People who don't normally visit modern art are flocking to the Ron Mueck.
Larger than life: Mueck's massive baby
This show is an enlarged version of the one I saw at the Fondation Cartier in Paris last December (where it broke the visitor record). The staggering glass verticals of Jean Nouvel's beautiful Paris building offered a more exciting context than the pleasing but conventional white walls of the Royal Scottish Academy. Because of its transparent sides, the Fondation was able to show Mueck's extraordinary creations against the backdrop of everyday life on a Paris street. The result was that the rest of mankind, made giant or Lilliputian in contrast to Mueck's peculiarly sized people, started looking as strange as his sculptures.
The Australian-born, London-based Mueck makes models of human beings. Some are enormous - twice, three times, 10 times lifesize. He wowed the Venice Biennale in 2001 with Boy, a crouching figure so massive its back nearly brushed the ceiling of the Arsenale. Some are tiny: half lifesize, or even smaller. He made his name with a half-lifesize sculpture of his father called Dead Dad, part of the Saatchi show Sensation! at the Royal Academy in 1998.
All are never less than alarmingly real. Mueck, with skills honed from years spent model-making for TV special-effects laboratories, uses fibreglass and silicone to achieve remarkable verisimilitude.
The 10 sculptures at Edinburgh were all made in the past five years. A few are familiar, including the querulous old man sitting dwarfed in a real rowing boat, first shown at the (London) National Gallery in 2003 when Mueck was associate artist there. For most, however, it is their British debut. There is a fraught Wild Man, three metres high when seated, digging his toes into the ground. There are two witchy mini-grandmothers, deep in suspicious gossip. There's an outsize new-born baby, reclining across an entire room, one sly eye spying on the world.
Spooning Couple: 'the best piece in the exhibition'
Their power is in their existence on the edge of plausibility. So life-like you wait to see them move, their anomalous size becomes something to marvel at. It is as if you have entered a fairy-tale world and encountered sprites and ogres.
They are also, and the new pieces more so, infused with the anguish of modern existence. The captions claim that Mueck's work is about timeless human conditions - birth, adolescence, old age - but the introversion of his models, and the look of existential paranoia on their faces, would seem a specifically Freudian malaise. This is why they resonate so powerfully in the modern context.
Yet something is striking in this, the largest grouping of Muecks yet: the small ones work better than the big ones. Mueck has been accused of grotesquery and vulgarity, and the larger sculptures are most open to this charge. The curious thing about his realism is that he actually works in caricature: his people have features just a bit too big for their faces. They tend to be overshot: upper lips jutting, infant like, over lower. In the bigger sculptures, this element is exaggerated further, and the result can be alienating
There is a huge woman lying in bed in this show, staring out in melancholic reverie, who feels clumsy and "other". Whereas the half-lifesize Spooning Couple, the best piece in the exhibition, is a deeply touching depiction of loneliness-in-intimacy, with a subtlety and delicacy the larger work cannot hope to achieve.
The big question that lingers about Mueck is where next? This show is an unnerving, unforgettable experience; those silicon eyes feel like weird windows into real men's souls. But Anthony d'Offay's protégé now has to demonstrate he can do more than make worried human beings in funny proportions. He needs a new trick up his sleeve: new subject matter, new materials even, to convince posterity he is more than a one-hit wonder, and truly deserving of the same global status of those with whom he once shared a gallery.
In the studio with Ron Mueck -
Ron Mueck begins to sew hair on Wild Man, 2005
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-----------------------------
------------------------------
Portraits in clay for Two Women, 2005
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
----------------------------------
Mueck makes the final adjustments to Two women
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-------------------------------
The prototype clay model of, A Girl , 2006
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
--------------------------------
Making the work
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
---------------------------------
The full-size head of the baby
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
---------------------------------
The finished work
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
---------------------------------
Mueck working on the clay model for In Bed, 2005
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-----------------------------------
Casting from the mould
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-------------------------------------
Each hair is sewn by hand
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
---------------------------------------
Mask II, 2001-2
Mixed media
© Ron Mueck, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-----------------------------------------
Mask III, 2005
Mixed media
© Ron Mueck, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
------------------------------------------
Wild Man, 2005
Mixed media
© Ron Mueck, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-------------------------------------------
Man in a Boat, 2002
Mixed media
© Ron Mueck, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
------------------------------------------------
Ron Mueck: bigger than Monet?
(Filed: 15/08/2006)
The startlingly realistic figures in Ron Mueck's first Scottish exhibition are drawing huge crowds. Serena Davies sizes up an acute observer of modern life
In 2001, the art dealer Anthony d'Offay suddenly closed his hugely successful London gallery. At one swoop he dissolved the most magnificent stable of contemporary artists in Britain - Gilbert and George, Anselm Keifer, Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, to name just a few giants of the art scene. And, from all these, there was a single artist d'Offay chose to continue to represent: Ron Mueck.
Leaving aside d'Offay's artistic acumen, the man is a brilliant businessman. The Royal Scottish Academy building now teems with crowds on the occasion of Scotland's first Ron Mueck exhibition. The show is a great hit. It looks likely to equal the record set by the most popular exhibition in the history of the National Galleries of Scotland, their 2003 Monet exhibition. It has already proved a triumphant vindication of the edgier regime promised by the National Galleries' new director-general, John Leighton. People who don't normally visit modern art are flocking to the Ron Mueck.
Larger than life: Mueck's massive baby
This show is an enlarged version of the one I saw at the Fondation Cartier in Paris last December (where it broke the visitor record). The staggering glass verticals of Jean Nouvel's beautiful Paris building offered a more exciting context than the pleasing but conventional white walls of the Royal Scottish Academy. Because of its transparent sides, the Fondation was able to show Mueck's extraordinary creations against the backdrop of everyday life on a Paris street. The result was that the rest of mankind, made giant or Lilliputian in contrast to Mueck's peculiarly sized people, started looking as strange as his sculptures.
The Australian-born, London-based Mueck makes models of human beings. Some are enormous - twice, three times, 10 times lifesize. He wowed the Venice Biennale in 2001 with Boy, a crouching figure so massive its back nearly brushed the ceiling of the Arsenale. Some are tiny: half lifesize, or even smaller. He made his name with a half-lifesize sculpture of his father called Dead Dad, part of the Saatchi show Sensation! at the Royal Academy in 1998.
All are never less than alarmingly real. Mueck, with skills honed from years spent model-making for TV special-effects laboratories, uses fibreglass and silicone to achieve remarkable verisimilitude.
The 10 sculptures at Edinburgh were all made in the past five years. A few are familiar, including the querulous old man sitting dwarfed in a real rowing boat, first shown at the (London) National Gallery in 2003 when Mueck was associate artist there. For most, however, it is their British debut. There is a fraught Wild Man, three metres high when seated, digging his toes into the ground. There are two witchy mini-grandmothers, deep in suspicious gossip. There's an outsize new-born baby, reclining across an entire room, one sly eye spying on the world.
Spooning Couple: 'the best piece in the exhibition'
Their power is in their existence on the edge of plausibility. So life-like you wait to see them move, their anomalous size becomes something to marvel at. It is as if you have entered a fairy-tale world and encountered sprites and ogres.
They are also, and the new pieces more so, infused with the anguish of modern existence. The captions claim that Mueck's work is about timeless human conditions - birth, adolescence, old age - but the introversion of his models, and the look of existential paranoia on their faces, would seem a specifically Freudian malaise. This is why they resonate so powerfully in the modern context.
Yet something is striking in this, the largest grouping of Muecks yet: the small ones work better than the big ones. Mueck has been accused of grotesquery and vulgarity, and the larger sculptures are most open to this charge. The curious thing about his realism is that he actually works in caricature: his people have features just a bit too big for their faces. They tend to be overshot: upper lips jutting, infant like, over lower. In the bigger sculptures, this element is exaggerated further, and the result can be alienating
There is a huge woman lying in bed in this show, staring out in melancholic reverie, who feels clumsy and "other". Whereas the half-lifesize Spooning Couple, the best piece in the exhibition, is a deeply touching depiction of loneliness-in-intimacy, with a subtlety and delicacy the larger work cannot hope to achieve.
The big question that lingers about Mueck is where next? This show is an unnerving, unforgettable experience; those silicon eyes feel like weird windows into real men's souls. But Anthony d'Offay's protégé now has to demonstrate he can do more than make worried human beings in funny proportions. He needs a new trick up his sleeve: new subject matter, new materials even, to convince posterity he is more than a one-hit wonder, and truly deserving of the same global status of those with whom he once shared a gallery.
In the studio with Ron Mueck -
Ron Mueck begins to sew hair on Wild Man, 2005
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-----------------------------
------------------------------
Portraits in clay for Two Women, 2005
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
----------------------------------
Mueck makes the final adjustments to Two women
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-------------------------------
The prototype clay model of, A Girl , 2006
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
--------------------------------
Making the work
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
---------------------------------
The full-size head of the baby
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
---------------------------------
The finished work
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
---------------------------------
Mueck working on the clay model for In Bed, 2005
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-----------------------------------
Casting from the mould
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-------------------------------------
Each hair is sewn by hand
Picture: Gautier Deblonde, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
---------------------------------------
Mask II, 2001-2
Mixed media
© Ron Mueck, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-----------------------------------------
Mask III, 2005
Mixed media
© Ron Mueck, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
------------------------------------------
Wild Man, 2005
Mixed media
© Ron Mueck, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
-------------------------------------------
Man in a Boat, 2002
Mixed media
© Ron Mueck, courtesy Anthony d'Offay, London
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk