Ron Mueck Sculpture on View at Brooklyn Museum

Saturday, 09 December 2006 13:42

Brooklyn, NY - Ron Mueck, a solo exhibition of eleven works by the sculptor Ron Mueck, known for his extraordinarily lifelike, empathetic renderings of his subjects, is presented at the Brooklyn Museum through February 4, 2007.  The exhibition includes five major new works first shown at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, where they were recently seen by an enthusiastic audience of more than 110,000 visitors.  Six additional works will be added to the Brooklyn exhibition, the only United States presentation before the show travels to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

The expanded exhibition

Ron Mueck has been co-organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Canada. The smaller version of the exhibition is currently breaking attendance records at the Royal Academy in Edinburgh.

 Born in Australia in 1958, 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 will be Dead Dad (1996–97), commemorating the death of his father through a somewhat smaller than life-size sculpture, which captivated visitors to the Brooklyn Museum when it was included in the exhibition Sensation.  Among the other works included in Ron Mueck will be Mask II (2001), a self-portrait of the artist’s slumbering head that measures nearly 4 feet from chin to brow, and Wild Man (2005), a nearly nine-foot-tall sculpture of a naked, bearded man clutching the stool on which he is seated.

Through his detailed works, which are always either smaller than life size or monumental, Mueck explores the ambiguous relationship of reality to artifice through strategies of imitation and illusion.  His pieces are sculpted with polyester resin (fiberglass) and 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, television, and advertising industries.  For a time he worked for Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, creating models and special effects.  He later moved to London. 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., the Nationalgaleries im Hamburger Bahnhoff in Berlin, and the National Gallery in London, a presentation that was the culmination of his two years there as an artist-in- residence.  His work has also been included in several group exhibitions.

The Brooklyn Museum presentation is organized by Charles Desmarais, Deputy Director for Art at the Brooklyn Museum 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238-6052.  A bilingual catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Visit www.brooklynmuseum.org