Ron Mueck at Brooklyn Museum

Ron Mueck
Brooklyn Museum
November 3, 2006 - February 11, 2007

Ron Mueck, a solo exhibition of ten works by the sculptor Ron Mueck, known for his extraordinarily lifelike, empathetic renderings of his subjects, will be presented at the Brooklyn Museum.

The exhibition includes five major new works, commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, where they were recently presented to an enthusiastic audience of 75,000 visitors. Five additional works on loan from North American collections are added to the Brooklyn exhibition, the only United States presentation before the show travels to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

Born in Australia in 1958, Ron Mueck began creating his scrupulously detailed sculpture in the 1990s. His works are so lifelike, with veins, wrinkles, sagging skin, and body hair, that viewers almost expect them to breathe. Included in the exhibition is Dead Dad (1996-97), commemorating the death of his father through a somewhat smaller than life-size sculpture, which captivated Brooklyn Museum visitors when it was included in the exhibition Sensation. Among the other works included in Ron Mueck are Wild Man (2005), a nine-foot sculpture of a naked, bearded man clutching the stool he is seated on, and Head of Baby (2003), a more than eight-foot-tall head of a newborn infant.

Through his detailed works, which are always either smaller than life size or monumental, Ron Mueck explores the ambiguous relationship of reality to artifice through strategies of imitation and illusion. His earlier pieces were sculpted with fiberglass, but recently he has begun to work with silicone, which is more flexible and allows greater ease in shaping body parts and implanting hair.

After working in Australian television as a puppet maker, Ron Mueck went to Los Angeles in 1986, where he worked in the film industry, and later moved to London. For a time he worked for Jim Henson on Sesame Street and the Muppet Show. For more than a decade, he has focused on creating his sculptures, which have been the subject of previous solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and have been included in several group exhibitions. 

The Brooklyn Museum presentation is organized by Charles Desmarais, Deputy Director for Art at the Brooklyn Museum. A bilingual catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052
www.brooklynmuseum.org