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RON MUECK
NOVEMBER 19, 2005—FEBRUARY 19, 2006
BIOGRAPHY
Ron Mueck was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1958 to parents of German descent.
As a child he often made toys and this pastime soon became a profession. Mueck began his career in
Australia as a puppet maker, both making and animating marionettes for children’s television. In 1986, he
spent time in Los Angeles working in cinema before moving to London, to work for Jim Henson on Sesame
Street and the Muppet Show. Their collaboration continued in the movies, where Ron Mueck supervised the
special effects for two feature-length films, Dreamchild (1985) and Labyrinth (1986). In 1990, he set up his
own business manufacturing models for the European advertising industry, and began working with
fibreglass, which he continues to use today.
Mueck’s artistic career per se began in 1996 when he made hyper-realistic sculpture of
Pinocchio for the painter Paula Rego, his mother-in-law. Rego used the sculpture as a model for a series of
Disney inspired paintings she made for the exhibition Spellbound: Art and Film exhibition at the Hayward
Gallery in London. The sculpture was exhibited with Rego’s painting during the exhibition where it was noticed
by Charles Saatchi who later commissioned Mueck to make a group of work for his collection. A year later,
Mueck was included in the exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal
Academy of Arts in London. Mueck’s work, Dead Dad, attracted considerable attention.
Entirely devoted to his artistic vocation for the past decade, Ron Mueck has participated
in a number of group exhibitions and is collected by many important museums throughout the world. In 2000,
the National Gallery in London invited him to be their Associate Artist for two years. This culminated in a
travelling exhibition to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, the Frans Hals Museum Haarlem and the
Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin. His monumental sculpture Boy was
presented at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington,
DC, gave Mueck a solo show in 2002. The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain exbihition is his first solo
show in France.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2005
Ron Mueck, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain,
Paris (touring Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,
Edinburgh; Brooklyn Art Museum, New York;
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa)
Ron Mueck: The Making of Pregnant Woman, 2005,
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
(touring National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne;
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane)
2003
Ron Mueck: Making Sculpture at the National Gallery,
National Gallery, London
Ron Mueck, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (Netherlands)
Ron Mueck, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof,
Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
2002
Ron Mueck Sculpture, Museum of Contemporary Art,
Sydney
Directions: Ron Mueck, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
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