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RON MUECK
NOVEMBER 19, 2005—FEBRUARY 19, 2006
RON MUECK’S BODIES AND SOULS by Robert Rosenblum
[…] Dead Dad, one of Mueck’s earliest works, immediately established his singularity,
not only in its fanatical insistence on the perfect replication of every hair, pore, wrinkle, or muscle that defines
an individual face and body, but in its shrinking of natural human dimensions to an alarmingly unnatural size.
This unique vision is no less indelibly printed on every sculpture he has made, so much so, in fact, that we tend
to think of him as a modern Frankenstein, the creator of a private universe of humanoids that both mirror us
and transform us into alien creatures. But like the inventions of even the strangest and most individual artists—
William Blake, for example—Mueck’s creatures can also be seen as branches off many different historical trees,
both past and present. As for the present, his work, in fact, can easily be seen as belonging to a growing
progeny of synthetic human beings spawned by artists who seem to be responding to a contemporary world
in which perfect replications—whether electronic or biological, a computer print-out or a cloned lamb—are
saturating our experience and blurring distinctions between originals and copies, between the natural and the
artificial. […] Mueck’s work fits comfortably into this expanding population of artists who have turned from
the artificial language of abstraction to the no less artificial language of realism, artists who, like the old
masters, can create such personal variations on three-dimensional facsimiles of the human body that we can
recognize immediately their individual hands. […]
[…] But Mueck’s choice of themes is no less distinctive, since he dares to tackle the kind
of subjects avoided by most contemporary artists, namely, the timeless, universal cycles of human existence,
from the womb to the tomb. The depiction of these momentous events in the stages of life, love, and death
was fundamental to Western art, recreated through biblical narratives and classical mythology; but for Mueck,
these pivotal experiences are recreated through the private lives of individuals, naked or clothed, whom we
recognize as members of our own world. […]
In describing the often painful realities of these works, what has not been mentioned so
far is their equally strong component of fantasy, instantly triggered by Mueck’s refusal to render his sculptures
as life-size figures. Instead, he startles us further by making them either smaller or larger than life, sometimes
with relatively subtle deviations from normal human dimensions, but more often with extreme exaggerations
of size that turn his figures into eerie races of pygmies and giants. In terms of the traditional history of
sculpture, there is nothing unusual about this. Michelangelo’s David is heroically scaled at a height of more
than four meters (13 l/2 feet), that is, twice normal size; whereas a table sculpture by Clodion of frolicking
nymphs and satyrs might be held in one hand. Figural sculpture, in fact, has always come in many sizes. But
when the figures become such frighteningly real facsimiles of ourselves and our contemporaries, these
shrinking and expanding dimensions transport us immediately to another territory, one closer to a world of the
irrational, where fearful creatures can shrivel into nothingness or loom high on the horizon. […]
Although at the Royal Academy’s Sensation show Mueck first became known within a
context of rebellious young British contemporaries, including Jenny Saville, who presumably turned their backs
on the past, it quickly became clear that his work was deeply rooted in the most venerable traditions of
Western art. Confronted with his passion for verisimilitude in sculpture, critics would often write about his
work by invoking ancestors, which might range all the way from the legend of Pygmalion and Galatea or the
palpable realities of Spanish Baroque polychrome sculpture (where real hair, blood stains, and glass tears
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