THE POSTER beta: Human-looking sculptures

By famous artist Ron Mueck, born in 1958 in Australia and currently working in Great Britain (2008).

Mueck moved on from Australia to establish his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry. Although highly detailed, these props were usually designed to be photographed from one specific angle hiding the mess of construction seen from the other side. Mueck increasingly wanted to produce realistic sculptures which looked perfect from all angles.

In 1996 Mueck transitioned to fine art, collaborating with his mother-in-law, Paula Rego, to produce small figures as part of a tableau she was showing at the Hayward Gallery. Rego introduced him to Charles Saatchi who was immediately impressed and started to collect and commission work. This led to the piece which made Mueck's name, Dead Dad, being included in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy the following year. Dead Dad is a rather haunting silicone and mixed media sculpture of the corpse of Mueck's father reduced to about two thirds of its natural scale. It is the only work of Mueck's that uses his own hair for the finished product.

Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images. His five-meter high sculpture Boy (1999) was a feature in the Millennium Dome and later exhibited in the Venice Biennale.

In 2002 his sculpture "Pregnant Woman" (the last picture of the list below shows its face) was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia for US$ 770,000.

Below, some photos of his sculptures:

How to download the images: If you feel just like me, that the images are too small to be fully appreciated you can download them to you computer. Most of them are available in a much larger size; just click on the image you want (not right-click) and in the resulting page right-click the image and then select "Save Image As..."