Ron Mueck

My initial interest in Ron Mueck, as I’m sure is most individuals, is the awe-inspiring craft and attention to detail. I have a tremendous amount of respect for artists that perfect their craft and materials and Mueck reins supreme in this category. However it is not only aesthetic reasons that I appreciate his work. His work is a great lesson for me in Scale and how you can evoke the viewer with both a large and small-scale work. Experimenting with the scale of the human figure does not allow to much rein for imaginative feats, but for the artists who make miniature cities and dioramas, there is greater scope for visionary or disturbing narrative content, plus varying amounts of social comment within Ron Mueck’s work.

In studying the figure, it is not this level of hyperrealism that I am interested in per-say, but I am interest in the concepts behind his work and his journey through informal training that has gained him much success into the contemporary art world.

With no formal art training, he perfected his skills in the commercial world of special effects, model making, and animatronics. In 1996, he presciently created for his mother-in-law, well-known British painter Paula Rego, a figure of Pinocchio, the quintessential embodiment of truth and lies. Saatchi saw this sculpture, and smitten, began acquiring Mueck’s work.

Sarah Tanguy, a writer for Sculpture Magazine says that: a certain freshness and sincerity of vision distinguish him from the blasé irony of many of his contemporaries who also explore strategies of realism. I feel that this “sincerity of vision,” is something that is tremendously lacking in my work and it is through looking at the works of artists such as Ron Mueck and other contemporaries that I am hoping to expose myself to strategies for obtaining a better understanding of the ideals that I am working with and be able to hone them down into a solid ideal that could capture a viewer if only for a moment in order to gain some contemplation about the work. In relation to this Jan Garden Castro makes a good point concerning the viewers of Mueck’s works, It is not that we identify with the figures; rather, we wonder who they are and how they are going to resolve whatever dilemmas they seem to face. We empathize. Since scale and size vary throughout Mueck’s work, viewers have odd subconscious relations to the spatial displacements between the sculptures.

Though the creature effects and model making field that Mueck was a part of he was able to hone skills that he has now been able to transfer into a contemporary light via the personal, and social concepts involved. I find it inspiring to know that growing up watching films that he as worked on that evoked my imagination, has now transcended the film and become an art piece that is taken seriously by the public eye. I do feel that imagination is extremely important and I think that I am constantly borrowing from my imagination when I create work. I think Jan Garden Castro sums up Ron Mueck’s work best:

“Through mastery of his materials in a seamless, seemingly effortless way, he awakens our willingness to believe in images that our imagination keeps alive.”

-Jan Garden Castro

Castro, Jan G. "Reviews." Sculpture July-Aug. 2007: 64. Web.

Collins, Judith. "Size & Scale." Sculpture Today. London: Phaidon, 2007. 394. Print.

Tanguy, Sarah. "The Progress of BIG MAN A Conversation with Ron Mueck." Sculpture July-Aug. 2003: 29-33. Web.