Ron Mueck

After making puppets and special effects for the movie industry, in 1996 the Australian artist Ron Mueck started developing a strange and powerful personal corpus that has profoundly renewed the question of contemporary sculpture.
The catalog published for his exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 2005 explores his fascinating yet disturbing hyperrealist work between the real world and a phantasmagorical realm. While the illusion of life is rendered by perfect imitation of the tiniest details of the human body, such as veins, wrinkles, or body hair, the sheer gigantism or smallness of the frequently disproportionate sculptures extracts them from the field of realism. Through these inward-looking, prostrated characters, dozing off or on the alert, the immense subtlety of Ron Mueck’s work lies in the evocation of personal, private worlds that shift the stakes of artistic realism into the psychological sphere.