Ron Mueck Ron Mueck

Ron Mueck draws upon memories, reveries, and everyday experience as he portrays his subjects with extraordinary compassion. What makes his sculptures exceptional is the manner in which he balances realism with the unreal. Frequently spending more than a year conceiving and making each figure, Mueck captures every feature with astonishing detail. The naturalism of his work, however, is undercut by his calculated play with scale: Some figures fill a gallery, whereas others stand no more than three feet high.

“I never made life-size figures because it never seemed to be interesting,” Mueck explained in a rare interview in 2003. “We meet life-size people every day. [Altering the scale] makes you take notice in a way that you wouldn’t do with something that’s just normal.”