He paints the skin colours to be as realistic as possible and, on the smaller figures, sews in real human hairs.

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1 August 1, 2006 Art show sees larger than life sculptures By Phil Miller, Arts Correspondent Massive babies, huge wild men, and gigantic women are being installed in the Royal Scottish Academy building in Edinburgh for one of the capital's biggest art shows of the year. Ron Mueck, the Australian-born, London-based artist, who creates lifelike sculptures of people in various freakish and unsettling sizes, is spending more than a week putting 10 works in place for its opening on Saturday. The exhibition includes the Wild Man and In Bed pieces, which dwarf their viewers, as well as a large new sculpture of a baby, called A Girl, which is 15 ft.long. Mueck's sculptures are made with a precise attention to reality, with individual pores, hairs, and other details making them appear lifelike, if outsized. The artist, who rarely speaks to the media, is personally installing the works in the RSA and adding the final touches to A Girl, including blood spots and an umbilical cord. The show includes five recent sculptures that Mueck showed last winter in Paris, attracting rave reviews and more than 100,000 visitors. Mueck learned his skills in creating lifelike forms from working in children's television, for the Jim Henson Creature Shop, creator of The Muppets, and making props and models for his own production company in London. He also worked on David Bowie's film, Labyrinth. Australian sculptor Ron Mueck works on his sculpture entitled A Girl at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, Scotland, July 31, Mueck works in a traditional way, by first creating small models and maquettes of what he wants to sculpt, before building the final pieces with fibreglass and other materials. He paints the skin colours to be as realistic as possible and, on the smaller figures, sews in real human hairs. On the larger sculptures, he uses horsehair or acrylic fibres, each sewn in individually. Clothes are also designed and fitted specifically, while the last detail the artist creates are the eyes. The Ron Mueck show opens on Saturday and runs until October 1.

2 August 7, 2006 Page 1 of 3 Of human beings: warts, umbilical cords and all By Kenny Farquharson Ultra-realist sculptor Ron Mueck is staging a show at the Royal Scottish Academy that promises to be one of the festival s biggest draws, writes Kenny Farquharson Ron Mueck came to Edinburgh armed with a photograph of his child taken just seconds after it came into the world. Like all newborn babies, it was an alarming sight a bruised bundle of flesh and blood and mucus. Mueck was particularly interested in the blood. Artist Ron Mueck puts the last finishing touches on It s a Girl I was given a sneak preview last week as the Australian-born sculptor was putting the final touches to his exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA). It will be one of the must-see art shows of the festival season. A highlight is a 15 ftlong baby girl, her umbilical cord still in place, every fold of flesh meticulously sculpted and painted to produce the hyper-realism that makes Mueck s creations look like living human beings. As he prepared for yesterday s opening, Mueck carefully painted blood on the baby s body, checking his photograph as he brushed on red swirls. Then he cut the baby s long strands of black hair, plastering them onto her scalp. Soon he was busy again, this time arranging the giant duvet that accompanies a work called In Bed, a twice-life-size maternal figure that dominates one of the RSA s main galleries. Every crumple had to be perfect, ever crease true to life. The baby is Mueck s newest project and the Edinburgh show is the first time it will be on public display. As with much of his work, the first impression it creates is disquieting, even disturbing. The scale turns a tiny, vulnerable baby into something from science fiction. A shy man, Mueck rarely gives interviews, preferring his works to speak for themselves and for critics to battle it out over his importance. To some eyes, his creations can seem monstrous. But after the initial shock, there is a more subtle effect on the viewer. There is a love of humanity here that is seldom found in the cold conceptualism of much contemporary art. Every human feature or flaw is painstakingly reproduced: veins under the skin on the back of a hand, the soft hairs on a young woman s arm, the hard skin of a heel. Seeing the human condition so acutely observed, in such honest and unflinching detail, evokes a sense of wonder, an appreciation of people in all their flawed diversity. Mueck s sculptures are either much larger or much smaller than life-size, yet they all appear, uncannily, as though they are about to come to life.

3 August 7, 2006 Page 2 of 3 Keith Hartley, chief curator of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, who has written an essay on Mueck for the exhibition catalogue, says that no matter how often he sees the sculptures, the effect is the same. The extraordinary thing is that although you know straight away that they can t be real because they are much larger or smaller than life-size, you expect them to move at any moment. There s this constant battle between what you feel and what you know a tussle between your emotions and your intellectual knowledge. It creates quite a tension, he says. Hartley believes this gut reaction is what discomfits art critics, many of whom dismiss Mueck s work as being more fit for Madame Tussaud s than an art gallery. To them, he is a model-maker, a one-trick showman, nothing more. They are surely missing the point. The success of Mueck s work is that it evokes a visceral response, something that is lacking in much of the conceptual work that dominates Britain s art scene. Ron s work goes back to old- fashioned humanism, says Hartley. You recognise yourself, and it makes you feel more yourself. Mueck s parents were both toy-makers his father carved from wood and his mother made rag dolls and his early career was in producing characters for children s television shows, including The Muppets and Sesame Street. From this, he branched out into making models for fantasy feature films, such as Dreamchild and Labyrinth. His entry into the art world came courtesy of his mother-in-law, the renowned Portuguese artist Paula Rego, whose dark allegorical work was recently the subject of a retrospective at Edinburgh s Talbot Rice Gallery. She asked him to make a Pinocchio figure for a children s story project she was working on, and she introduced him to the art collector Charles Saatchi, who commissioned four pieces. It was Mueck s big break. His best-known work, Dead Dad, a half-size depiction of his father s corpse, was one of the highlights of Saatchi s controversial Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in A haunting 15-ft high sculpture of a crouching boy was later made for the Millennium Dome. Mueck is not the only hyper- realist to show in Edinburgh in recent years. In 2002, the National Galleries of Scotland staged a retrospective of the work of Duane Hanson, the American creator of Tourists, one of the best-loved works of art in the Scottish collections. There are a couple of big differences, though, between Hanson and Mueck. The American s creations are all life-size and invariably make us wonder what these characters might actually be like as people, with their own foibles and fears, talents and secrets. The Australian s creations are less about individuals and more about wider insights into what it means to be human, in body and spirit. His pieces speak of vulnerability, madness, togetherness, loneliness and love.

4 August 7, 2006 Page 3 of 3 Mueck s sculptures are not exactly true to life in a classical way. Some features are exaggerated a head, a brow, a craned neck. Hartley says these imperfections actually have the effect of making the figures more human. I compare it to what Dickens does with his characters, exaggerating some characteristics, he says. There is a slight caricature or twist that makes them more lifelike. Ron emphasises the slight imperfections we all have. All of this viewers have to glean for themselves; there will be no clues from the notoriously uncommunicative Mueck. In the RSA last week, the sum total of his conversation was a nod and a shy half-smile. He last spoke about his work four years ago to an Australian magazine that happened to catch him on a day when, to the alarm of his interviewer, all he wanted to do was talk. Asked about the effect he wanted to have on the people who came to see his work, he said: I m not trying to tell anybody anything. I m just surprised that a lump of fibreglass can elicit an emotional response. I don t know why I m doing it, but I don t know what else I d be doing, he said. I m not driven by art, it s just all I can do.

5 August 6, 2006 Page 1 of 4 THE OBSERVER PROFILE Ron Mueck: From Muppets to Motherhood By Sean O'Hagan A new exhibition of the ultra-realistic, outsize sculptures of the Australian model-maker marks him out as the finest artist of his generation In 2003, the National Gallery hosted an exhibition by Ron Mueck, who had worked for two years as its artist-in-residence. His remit had been to produce a body of work inspired by its Old Master collection. It was a small show, just four pieces, and the predominant theme, culled from countless images of the Nativity, was motherhood and birth. Ron Mueck s Mother and Child, 2001, mixed media A naked, heavily pregnant woman stood in the centre of one room, made out of Mueck's standard materials, acrylic, fibreglass and silicone. Called simply Pregnant Woman, she loomed above visitors, lifelike, and yet about a third larger than life-size, her face drawn and troubled as if by the sheer weight of impending motherhood. Nearby, a tiny baby lay sleeping, life-size, almost human, swaddled in a blanket tied with real string. The sculpture that attracted most attention, though, was of a mother still startled by the presence of her newborn baby that rested, slimy and glistening, on her stomach. Though Mueck's Mother and Child was a small piece, roughly half life-size, the response to it was on a scale that the show's curator, Colin Wiggins, had never witnessed before. It was, he says now, 'utterly unprecedented'. So much so that Wiggins would often pop into the gallery just to observe people's reactions. Mostly, they would linger around the figures, silent, seemingly awestruck. 'It was the most amazing response,' says Wiggins, still sounding surprised and enthralled. 'You felt that they were confronting a sacred object. You could see that it was communicating something in a visceral and emotional way. I remember my mother coming to the show and standing in front of the sculpture of the woman and the newborn baby. She just welled up. She couldn't speak, then finally she said, "Yes, that's what it's like."' Not for the first time, Mueck had struck a chord that resonated way beyond the confines of the contemporary art world, making conceptual art that spoke directly to a public either bemused or outraged by the

6 August 6, 2006 Page 2 of 4 provocations of his more famous contemporaries. 'He is that rare thing,' elaborates Wiggins, 'a contemporary artist who does not need critics or curators explaining his work. The art communicates its mystery directly and with a great emotional power.' This much was evident when Mueck first appeared on the conceptual art scene seemingly out of nowhere and at the very height of the hype and hysteria that attended the Young British Artists movement. In 1997, a single, relatively small sculpture by the then unknown Mueck elicited a similarly dramatic response from anyone who visited the Royal Academy for the show Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection. Here, amid View of Mueck s Dead Dad, 2001, mixed media more well-known signature works by the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers, it was Mueck's Dead Dad that drew gasps of wonder from both the curious and the jaded. A slightly smaller-than-lifesize sculpture of a male corpse, naked, alabaster pale and laid out as if awaiting the mortician's blade, Dead Dad was that rare thing, a contemporary artwork that was both genuinely humble and genuinely heart-stopping. 'It's all about scale, not size,' Damien Hirst said last year. 'I mean, look at Dead Dad. There's a perfect example - smaller than life-size and absolutely massive. It's so emotional that, once you see it, you can't get it out of your head.' On close inspection, Dead Dad also revealed a rare talent for morbid detail: the darkblue stubble that stippled the pallid chin, the yellowing toenails and calloused feet. Surrounded by the shriller, more wilfully provocative creations of his more famous peers, Mueck's tiny, almost unbearably intimate meditation on mortality only seemed to grow in stature. This was an emblematic artwork. Back then, the question: 'Have you seen Dead Dad yet?' became one of those mantras that more often accompany the crossover success of a sleeper hit film. Ron Mueck had gatecrashed the Sensation party and stolen the show. Unbelievably, Sensation was the first show in which Mueck exhibited. Now, nine years on, and still very much an outsider on the contemporary British art scene, the Australian-born artist who never attended art school but, instead, served an apprenticeship with Muppeteer Jim Henson, has been granted a one-man show at the Scottish Royal Academy in Edinburgh. The show comprises just 10 works. It does not, alas, include Dead Dad, now owned, like much of Mueck's still small body of work, by an American private collector. It does, though, include Ghost (1998), his eightfoot-high figure of a gawky, pubescent girl, caught forever in the awkwardness of adolescence, as well as

7 August 6, 2006 Page 3 of 4 Spooning Couple, his depiction of two side-by-side sleeping figures who seem effortlessly intimate but oddly apart. The most dramatic works, though, are two brand-new pieces, both epic in scale even by Mueck's standards. One is called In Bed and depicts a huge woman resting under a giant duvet, her eyes gazing into the distance as if she is lost in that troubled hinterland between dreaming and waking. It takes up nearly half the enormous floor space of the upstairs gallery. Another, A Girl, is a five-metre-long sculpture of a newborn baby, one eye tightly close, umbilical cord still attached, wrinkled skin flecked in natal blood. Both are pure Mueck: works of imaginative exaggeration that somehow manage to be intensely intimate, slightly disturbing and compellingly human. The Scottish show is a canonisation of sorts, an acknowledgment that the ingenue who gatecrashed the YBA party and who subsequently shunned the excesses and shock tactics of that heady and hysterical time may yet turn out to be one of the most serious artists of our time. 'I think that Ron is a sacred artist working in a secular way,' says writer and academic Marina Warner, who has written extensively about the power of fairy tales and religious iconography in art and literature. 'He does somehow define the holy and his work often extends into the idea of love itself, which is a hard subject in our tarnished times. When he works small, the intimacy and intensity of feeling he achieves is quite rare and all the more powerful for that.' Mueck's trajectory has been, to say the least, atypical. Now 48, he was born in Australia to German parents who, revealingly, worked as toy-makers. The family emigrated to Britain when he was a small boy; he eventually settled into a job making models for film, television and advertising. A self-taught craftsman and artist, Mueck worked in children's TV, before joining Jim Henson, creator of The Muppet Show. Under Henson's tutelage, he created the special effects for the Henson's state-of-the-art fantasy film, Labyrinth, which starred David Bowie. At 37, though, Mueck walked away from his lucrative career as a model-maker, frustrated by the constrictions of the job. 'Everything I was doing was geared towards that final flat image, the piece of print,' he confessed in one of his few early interviews. 'Everything was predetermined. I was always telling someone else's story. I wanted to make something that a photograph wouldn't do justice to.' Mueck's eventual entry into the contemporary art world was almost accidental. He is married to Caroline Willing, a scriptwriter, whose mother is artist Paula Rego. On a family holiday in America, Rego watched, mesmerised, as Mueck created a giant sand sculpture of a dragon for his two young daughters. Later, when she was working on a series of drawings for an impending group show at London's Hayward Gallery, she mentioned that she needed a model of Pinocchio. Mueck duly obliged, creating a 33-inch-tall, ultra-realist rendering of Pinocchio, wearing just Y-fronts and an oddly embarrassed expression. The silicone Pinocchio caught the attention of a passing Charles Saatchi, who immediately pounced, buying Dead Dad, the second piece of art the newly liberated Mueck had created. The rest is history of an oddly synchronistic kind.

8 August 6, 2006 Page 4 of 4 Mueck remains an elusive figure, not least because he says little and is seldom seen on the London party circuit. Thus far, while quite happy to talk about his working methods, he has resolutely resisted all attempts to make him elucidate the meaning of his work. Since Sensation, his ascendancy has been sure-footed. He is the only remaining artist represented by the once all-powerful Anthony d'offay, who is now semiretired, having closed down the small London galleries that, in the pre-saatchi era, were a magnet for collectors. The words that recur most often when you ask Mueck's acquaintances about him are 'hard working', 'committed' and 'utter perfectionist'. 'Ron is very hands-on,' says his longtime technical assistant, Charlie Clark, 'and he works with a very small team, none of whom is employed full time. He is an extraordinary craftsman and utterly meticulous in his approach to the making of art. Absolutely nothing happens without him being there. A small figure, for instance, might sit on an assistant's knee for several days while individual hairs are punched into the silicone head, but Ron will already have worked out how the hair should fall over the face.' In an age when surface and style seem to have triumphed over depth and craftsmanship, Ron Mueck's epic and tiny human figures, in all their exaggerated realism and mysterious otherworldliness, do, indeed, hark back to a time when art pertained to the sacred. And yet, for all that, a great part of their emotive thrust resides in the essential and disturbing truths they reveal. 'He so nearly captures that extra bit, what we call the soul or spirit, that flame inside that makes us ourselves,' says Marina Warner. 'He takes one to the very edge of the idea of life, calls into question what it is to be a person, what it is to be human.' No wonder, then, that our response is a kind of stunned, almost disbelieving silence. The silence that attends the almost miraculous that great art demands. The Mueck lowdown Born: 1958 in Australia to German parents who were toy-makers. Married to Caroline Willing. They have two daughters. Mother-in-law is Paula Rego. Previous jobs: Worked as a window-dresser and a model-maker for Jim Henson. Discovered by Charles Saatchi. Breakthrough work: Dead Dad, a tiny, extraordinarily lifelike sculpture of a dead man, which he created while coming to terms with his father's death. What he says: 'Although I spend a lot of time on the surface, it's the life inside I want to capture.' What others say: 'Dead Dad is the equivalent of Vermeer's The Lace-maker or Hilliard's portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh.' - Poet Craig Raine. 'Mueck's figures carry their meaning like a subtitle... you get the guiding concept immediately and it's a familiar one... frankly corny.' - Art critic Tom Lubbock.

9 November 10, 2006 Page 1 of 2 Giant Baby, Dead Dad and Others, Realer Than Real By Grace Glueck AT the Brooklyn Museum the Australian artist Ron Mueck has delivered A Girl, the biggest human infant ever hatched. More than 16 feet long (weight unrecorded) and not yet unhooked from her hawser-like umbilical cord, she still has traces of birth blood on her wrinkled body. You may have sensed by now that she is not a real baby. What she is is an extraordinarily lifelike sculpture made with exquisite craftsmanship by the 48-year-old Mr. Mueck, who is known for his ultrarealistic re-creations of the human figure in silicone and fibreglass. A Girl, too big to transport easily, reposes in a ground-floor Ron Mueck, Mask II, 2001, mixed media, 30 3/8 x 46 1/2 x 33 1/2 inches gallery, apart from the 11 other works including another infant, 10¼ inches high and very evidently male, that hangs on a wall like a crucifix in Ron Mueck, a midcareer survey of his work in the museum s fifth-floor rotunda. (The Rodins it has displaced can now be seen in the first-floor entrance pavilion.) The show, organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the National Gallery of Canada, includes five new works recently presented at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris. If you saw the Sensation exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, you will probably remember Mr. Mueck s smaller-than-life sculpture Dead Dad, a rendition of his father as a nude corpse (with few exceptions, Mr. Mueck s facsimiles are vulnerably unclad). That 40-inch sculpture, one of his more affecting creations, is also included in this show. The rest of the works have not been seen here before. So realistic are his figures, with their veined, wrinkled, hairy skin and lifelike expressions and body language, that you might almost converse with them. The son of German toymakers in Melbourne, and a former puppet maker and model maker who worked with Jim Henson, Mr. Mueck (pronounced MEW-eck) is consummately skilled, more than a match for the technical cleverness of contemporary realist sculptors like John DeAndrea, Duane Hanson and Maurizio Cattelan, whose work his invokes. His work can also be compared to that of current realist painters, in particular Lucian Freud. Mr. Mueck s Big Man (2000), an anonymous seven-foot hulk totally nude, including his bald head that squats in a corner regarding the world with saturnine displeasure, invokes Mr. Freud s paintings of his vast, fleshy model Leigh Bowery. Mr. Mueck differs from such artists, however, in his empathetic involvement with his subjects, who

10 November 10, 2006 Page 2 of 2 seem to embody, in one way or another, the challenges and perils of the human condition. He sportingly puts himself in the show too, in the form of a giant, sharply cut mask of his face, lying on its side, eyes closed and wearing a 5 o clock shadow. One of his most sardonic vignettes is Spooning Couple (2005), a seminude man and woman lying intimately together on a bed, but not in a sexual embrace. Each is wrapped in self, arms cradling his or her own body rather than the other s. The scale is suitably intimate too, about two feet long by a foot wide. She looks apprehensive; he seems to smirk. Their physical togetherness points up their psychic separation. In Man in a Boat, a more searching and mysterious scene, a small man, a little more than two feet high, sits naked and hapless toward the prow of a life-size rowboat, arms folded, peering with some alarm at what lies ahead. Whatever his destination, he is powerless to affect it. Less cosmic is Two Women (2005), an amusing skit in which two venerable ladies each less than three feet tall, each buttoned into a weary old coat trade gossip. Mr. Mueck gets into really exaggerated scale in several pieces besides the giant baby, and this is where he stumbles. Wild Man (2005), a hairy, bearded giant nearly nine feet high who sits in a catatonic trance, hands gripping the edge of a bench, comes off as a carnival sideshow or a wax museum exhibit. And once you get over the initial shock of In Bed, a colossal tableau 21 feet long of a woman lying in bed, giant hand to apprehensive face, you wonder: Why so big? The subject has not earned its monumentality, so to speak, and its size distracts from its emotional intensity. A small explanatory section of the show is devoted to Mr. Mueck s exhaustive working process, which includes making preliminary models, then making fiberglass and silicone molds from them; painting surface details like veins and wrinkles; and drilling or punching thousands of tiny individual pores in the plastic skin for tiny hairs. His final act is to sculpture the eyes. Voilà! If they succeed as fun things to have in the room, I m happy, Mr. Mueck is quoted as saying in one of the museum s wall labels. At the same time I wouldn t be satisfied if they didn t have some kind of presence that made yo u think they re more than just objects. Objects they are of course, but there are moments when you almost believe they have lives.

11 JAMES COHAN GALLERY July/August 2007 Ron Mueck Brooklyn Museum By Jan Garden Castro Ron Mueck does two things very well: he gets under the skins of his hyper-real figures, and he uses scale to expose vulnerabilities. In his recent exhibition, the viewer was greeted by a supine newborn baby the size of a small bathroom, its fetal blood not fully wiped away and its umbilical cord dangling like a thick, twisted rope. Each figure s eyes mirror his or her soul. A hairy nude giant with crossed eyes seems fearful of something small. A woman the size of a Manhattan bedroom stares over the covers of her oversized bed, unready to face the day. A boy crouches next to a mirror, seemingly lost in terms of having an identity. A black man s giant round face Australian sculptor Ron Mueck works on his sculpture entitled A Girl at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, Scotland, July 31, exudes ambition and, perhaps, frustration. Mueck offered a self-portrait, too: a mask about triple human size with meticulously attached facial hair and an unfinished, neutral back. Smaller figures included two weathered old women hunched together, a baby in the shape of a crucifix, and a naked couple curled, spoon-style, against each other, sharing their warmth but not their thoughts. Mueck revels his process in an accompanying film and catalogue. Instead of using his gifts to create exquisite monsters, he makes flawed human equivalents who communicate a range of emotions and psychological states. 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 off subconscious relations to the spatial displacements between the sculptures. We approach the large ones as though they were giants, even though most of them seem unsure of themselves. Some small ones seem less fragile. Mueck reverses our usual notion that larger is stronger and smaller is weaker. The baby compounds this direction by being huge, strong, and fragile all at once. It is built like a tank, but the unfocused and inward eyes reveal that it cannot serve its own needs. Mueck s visceral figures engage viewers in what ends up being a philosophical investigation of the human condition. 533 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NEW YORK TEL FAX

12 November 2001 Page 1 of 2 Ron Mueck at James Cohan (New York) By Edward Leffingwell Ron Mueck, Mother and Child, 2001, mixed media, 9 ½ x 35 x 15 inches The quiet verisimilitude of Ron Mueck's fiberglass resin Mask II and his silicon and fiberglass resin Mother and Child (both 2001) humanizes the tender oddity of their scale, the one vastly larger than life and the other very much smaller. Mueck's first solo exhibition in New York followed his much lionized 1997 debut during the inaugural run of "Sensation" in London and anticipated the monumental presence of Crouching Boy (1999) at this past summer's Venice Biennale. Mueck's newest offerings were simply presented on white wooden plinths. Strategically placed diagonally opposite each other in an otherwise empty gallery, they directed the visitor to the viewing experience itself. Mueck elaborates details to such a point that the identification of viewer

13 November 2001 Page 2 of 2 and object is as close to complete as seems reasonably possible. Mask II depicts, at monumental scale, the face and part of the head and hair of a young man; lying on its side, the form is an empty shell, and the back of the head is missing. Enlarged as though in a magnifying mirror, the abundant follicles sprout gut-string stubble as a gentle sleeping smile winks above the prognathous jaw. Around the eyes, pale blue veins suffuse the translucent skin. No more than a yard long, the uncanny Mother and Child is compelling in its vulnerability, thrust up on its pedestal toward the viewer's gaze. The woman is shown, in delicately nuanced detail, having just given birth; the baby, shiny as though still wet, and still attached to the umbilical cord, rests on her belly. As the mother raises her head to look at the baby, a wisp of hair is caught near the corner of her mouth, and the veins below the surface of her porcelain skin radiate around her breasts and across her belly, hands and feet, and perfect toes. Mueck brings to his work an acute awareness of physical specificity and human frailty. He produces figures that are a world apart from those of sculptors he recalls. His objects are in quality and kind utterly unlike the demotic, mall-culture portraits of Duane Hansen. They evade the easy polychrome prurience of John de Andrea's models, lack the glacial aridity of the mannequins of Charles Ray or the naughty, mutant posturing of Jake and Dinos Chapman. Perhaps the most important difference from these other artists is Mueck's expressive manipulation of scale, which is never literal. In addition, Mueck's attention is totally focused on the primary object, and he is willing to rupture the suspension of disbelief by allowing the viewer to draw near. The main thing about Mueck's work, however, is its subtle yet overwhelming lifelikeness, which is startlingly sufficient to suggest to the viewer that this object is an eerily accurate simulacrum of the human substance, body and soul.

14 August 13, 2006 Page 1 of 2 Where there's Mueck, there's class By Laura Cumming Ron Mueck's flawless finish and crowd-pleasing 'skill' have their detractors. But the humanity that pervades every figure here proves him a giant among scuptors Mueck s Dead Dad, 2001, Silicone and Acrylic Paint, 8 X 40 X 15 inches It seems that Ron Mueck, in a career spanning barely a decade, has become sculptor laureate of the human condition. From the moment he showed Dead Dad, that piteously half-sized corpse, so supernaturally real, over which a great soul seemed to hover, he has given startling form to the mystery and anguish of existence. Because his figures are so stupendously lifelike he is often accused of mere skill, though it's a skill unparalleled in art history. But which modern sculptures, from his newborns to his derelicts, have drawn such pity and compassion from the public? Mueck's soaring popularity appears to rile his critics, who denounce him as corny or simple. This is partly because he represents life's great staging posts - birth, death, adolescence, loss - and partly, one suspects, because his background in model-making and special effects (and, possibly, his first work, a spiky little imp) allow some people to equate him with Disney. His is a narrative art, to be sure, and entirely accessible. Unlike the hyper-real figures of Duane Hanson, those camera-slung tourists and blue-collar workers who keep themselves to themselves, maintaining their otherness and inner identity, Mueck's people offer themselves to interpretation very readily. But although meaning is their raison d'etre - they're exemplars, like so many characters in fiction or drama - they may also have extraordinary force of personality. Take Ghost, a lanky pubescent backed up against the wall in her bathing suit, agonised at such cringeing exposure. Her skin is painfully mottled, her forearms downier than she might have hoped and everything about her inspires tenderness: the desire to supply a towel, to tuck back loose hairs, to protect her from her own physicality. Her head is inclined as if sensing your presence, the very paradigm of awkwardness, in short. But she holds fast and her eyes imply endurance. It's not her shame but her courage that strikes. Ghost would tower above the tallest adult. Two Women - a pair of tightly permed old ladies in slack stockings - are not much bigger than infants. Mueck's figures, unlike Hanson's, are never life-size and these enlargements and miniaturisations are crucial to his purpose. Inner emotion is dramatised by outer scale and this is often counterintuitive. So the girl's vast size makes her not powerful but even more vulnerable, while the two old ladies, seized with tremendous spite, are not to be mistaken for dear little dolls. The biggest work in this retrospective is three metres high - a wild-haired giant on a stool. But this man is naked and flinching as if terrified by your presence. Or by suddenly finding himself here, threatened, viewed, confined: he clings to his stool for protection. It is, you could say, among the most site-specific sculptures ever made: a man caught in continuous reaction to the here and now and wholly characterised - cowed and

15 August 13, 2006 Page 2 of 2 even reduced, despite his size - by the circumstances. Viewed from behind, The Wild Man appears tremendously powerful, his back a wall of muscle. Circling, you may coincide with the focus of his gaze and get the shock, no less powerful for being technically predictable, of discovering he is far more frightened than you. Mueck makes the most of sculpture's three dimensions; in this case, the narrative, the backstory, so to speak, changes as you move. An illusion like this depends on absolute verisimilitude. Mueck's technique is so invisible and so perfect that his figures look begotten, not made. Naturally, you search for flaws - a false skin tone, an obviously manmade follicle - but not to challenge his skill. It is a more basic compulsion: a coming to terms with the fact that although you know these people are sculptures, some quirk of cognition still insists they are real. Two characteristic paradoxes are made especially apparent at the RSA. The light flooding down through the cupolas is pitiless, exposing an occasional hard glint in the flesh and yet the figures seem human. Nor does implausible scale ever seem to breach the illusion. Mueck is showing an enormous sculpture of a newborn baby, still sticky with blood, its tiny/huge fists clenched, one eye involuntarily open to the harshness of the new world; and he is showing a miniature figure of the same. Both are profoundly, and equally, moving. This may be because of the astonishing fact that close up - and this is an art that calls you close - the imitation of reality feels unimpeachably true. But I think it also has to do with the depth and meaning of Mueck's works. There is, for instance, a little naked man seated in the prow of a boat, squinting at something in the distance. With his calluses and thinning hair, he is as awesomely realistic as usual. But his personality is entirely subordinate to his role as metaphor - adrift, all at sea, embarking on the voyage of life. Similarly, an outsize woman lies beneath a gigantic duvet, gaze far away, hand to chin like Rodin's Thinker. She is acting a part, performing the concept of reverie, boredom or melancholy; it's hard to tell. But she has no character of her own, whereupon the illusion noticeably wavers. One of the sculptures here is a huge self-portrait of the artist's sleeping face on its side, a dozing Goliath with a touch of drool about the lips. Walk round it and the hollow mould is revealed, as if to say all this is merely skin-deep. That is the modest reticence that characterises Mueck's best work, where he creates a figure that seems to have autonomous life and soul; as if he had only helped it into existence and then departed, leaving it to fend on its own.

16 JAMES COHAN GALLERY March 15, 2007 Page 1 of 2 Mueck s baby delivered to capital A huge fibreglass sculpture of a baby which attracted unprecedented crowds while it was on exhibit in Edinburgh has been bought for the city. Ron Mueck's sculpture called A Girl has been secured for 400,000 for exhibiting in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. While it was on show in Edinburgh last year, 130,000 people went to view it over a nine week period. The Art Fund gave a 50,000 grant towards the purchase of the art work. Ron Mueck sculpture called "A Girl" will arrive this year in Edinburgh The Ron Mueck exhibition in 2006 became the most popular contemporary show ever organised by the National Galleries of Scotland. A Girl is a huge sculpture of a newborn baby, rendered in painstaking detail complete with umbilical cord. Mueck's sculpture includes every tiny detail down to the baby's wispy hair and hundreds of tiny folds and wrinkles in her skin. Ron Mueck's work became famous in 1997 when a poignant sculpture of his dead father's small, naked body was exhibited at the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition in London. Since then his life-like sculptures, often naked and always much larger or much smaller than real life, have caused a worldwide sensation. Technical mastery David Barrie, director of The Art Fund said: "Last year Edinburgh took Ron Mueck's extraordinary sculpture to its heart, and it's wonderful that it will now be going on permanent display in the city for which it was made. "Like all of Mueck's work, A Girl is a very powerful sculpture, breathtaking in its technical mastery. It will astonish all who see it, old or young." Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said: "I am delighted that Mueck's gigantic painted fibreglass baby has found a home in Scotland. "We have an outstanding collection of super-realist sculpture and I am sure she will become as iconic and familiar as Duane Hanson's life-size Tourists." 533 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NEW YORK TEL FAX

17 JAMES COHAN GALLERY March 15, 2007 Page 2 of 2 Last year Edinburgh took Ron Mueck's extraordinary sculpture to its heart, and it's wonderful that it will now be going on permanent display in the city for which it was made, David Barrie The Art Fund The Ron Mueck exhibition is currently on display at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa from 2 March to 6 May It is understood A Girl will arrive in Edinburgh at the end of the year. 533 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NEW YORK TEL FAX

18 JAMES COHAN GALLERY February 27, 2007 Page 1 of 2 Massive art, massive controversy By Paul Gessell Ron Mueck portrays life as it is, only huge. People love it, but as Paul Gessell writes, the critics don't. The art world cannot decide whether high-flying Australian artist Ron Mueck is a genius or a fraud. But the masses -- including former governor general Adrienne Clarkson -- definitely love him and definitely love his giant babies, naked old men and gossiping old biddies. Strong opinions surround the camera-shy Mr. Mueck, whose globetrotting solo show opens Friday at the National Gallery of Canada, because he knows how to attract a crowd with his creepy, unsettling sculptures of extraordinarily lifelike, but not life-sized, people. This giant sculpture, titled A Girl, is part of a show opening Friday at the National Gallery. The works of its creator, Australian-born Ron Mueck, are often immense and immensely popular, much to the chagrin of many art experts. Sixteen works will be shown in Ottawa. Photograph by: Timothy A. Clary, Getty Images Images of Mr. Mueck's work are pirated and circulated endlessly on such popular websites as Flickr and YouTube. Fans surreptitiously wander galleries videotaping and photographing his shows. He is blogged about ad nauseam. His celebrity is such that he simply cannot be ignored, whether or not you like him. Mr. Mueck is "accessible," which means people "get" his art. Galleries are forced to extend their hours as visitors line up to see his silicone and fibreglass creations marking the stages of life from birth, to adolescence and, finally, to death. Mr. Mueck's popularity, of course, represents an unforgivable sin to the segment of the art world that believes great art must be unfathomable to the great unwashed. And, to these elites, Mr. Mueck's art is no more unfathomable than an unclothed department store mannequin with an angry look and flabby bottom. The works are not classical beauties. Instead, they are too human, you might say, because of the wrinkles, moles, varicose veins and other flaws on these creations, which range from pygmies to seven-metre-tall giants. Indeed, Mr. Mueck's characters look remarkably like real people. It is hard to escape the notion you are peering, voyeuristically, into your neighbours' windows and seeing things best left unseen. Sixteen of Mr. Mueck's sculptures will be in the National Gallery exhibition. Before arriving in Ottawa, the exhibition, with slight variations, was in Paris, Edinburgh and Brooklyn. The crowds were generally appreciative; some fans were downright cultish. The professional critics were not always so kind. Grace Glueck, writing in The New York Times, was generally positive in reviewing the Mueck exhibition and describing the raw humanity within it. "Objects they are, of course, but there are moments when you almost believe they have lives." 533 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NEW YORK TEL FAX

19 JAMES COHAN GALLERY February 27, 2007 Page 2 of 2 Ms. Glueck did complain about some of Mr. Mueck's oversized people. "Wild Man, a hairy, bearded giant nearly nine feet high who sits in a catatonic trance, hands gripping the edge of a bench, comes off as a carnival sideshow or a wax museum exhibit. And once you get over the initial shock of In Bed, a colossal tableau feet long -- of a woman lying in bed, giant hand to apprehensive face, you wonder: Why so big? The subject has not earned its monumentality, so to speak, and its size distracts from its emotional intensity." Jonathan Jones, writing in Britain's The Guardian, was downright caustic about this "brainless," "flimsy gimcrack charade" that was only masquerading as art but was, nevertheless, attracting adoring crowds. "I just don't think, if you are one of these people, you see enough art," Mr. Jones wrote of Mr. Mueck's fans. "You need to get out more." The Jones review sparked a deluge of letters, pro and con, to The Guardian. "I suggest you get out less," harrumphed one letter-writer to the critic. A supporter of the Mr. Jones' point of view countered by describing Mr. Mueck's work as "clever -- but so is taxidermy." Regular National Gallery of Canada visitors will be familiar with at least one of Mr. Mueck's creations -- the giant baby head the size of a cube van usually parked at the entrance to the contemporary galleries. The gallery also owns Old Woman in Bed. She's the kind of frail, old person we are all afraid of becoming. Ms. Clarkson says Head of a Baby is one of her favourite works in the National Gallery and that every time she sees it, she wants to take it home. "I imagine the body is somewhere underneath, huge, fat, with wrinkled wrists," Ms. Clarkson says. "It isn't a severed head; it isn't grotesque. It give us a vision of life and what it can be." Mr. Mueck achieved fame -- or is that notoriety? -- with the unveiling in 1997 of Dead Dad, a rendition of the artist's own father in death. American art critic Robert Rosenblum, the author of the Ron Mueck exhibition catalogue, described his reaction upon first seeing Dead Dad a decade ago. It was "so shockingly real and so shockingly unreal that, like an unexpected trauma, it left an indelible imprint." Mr. Mueck has been leaving imprints across the globe ever since. His show is something of a rarity at the National Gallery of Canada, where contemporary art has been given short shrift in recent years. The last curator of contemporary art, Kitty Scott, left the federal institution last summer, complaining about the difficulty in getting contemporary shows mounted. Seven months later, a replacement for Ms. Scott has yet to be named. Contemporary shows usually draw far smaller crowds than Old Masters or Impressionists. Hence the Renoir Landscapes exhibition slated for the summer. Mr. Mueck has the potential, however, to keep the turnstiles spinning. At the least, his exhibition should spark a lively debate: Does his art expose the human condition in all its frailties or are these simply absurdly sized mannequins? 533 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NEW YORK TEL FAX

20 August 2, 2006 Page 1 of 2 ENTERTAINMENT It's big and it's very, very clever By Alex O Connell Ron Mueck s hyper-realist sculptures are both unsettling and exhilarating The baby is nameless and only hours old her blood and mucus-smeared body laid out like pork belly on a butcher s slab. Her umbilical cord is cut but not tied as she stretches out of the foetal position that has restricted her for nine months, feeling her muscles, her arms pushed out at her sides, her fists clenched in defiant independence. Her forehead has the creases of a tiny but hardened worrier deep furrows that are peculiar to newborns. One nervous eye peeks out from behind an eyelid. She has none of the physical ease that comes with experience, and her senses are being assaulted by the outside world for the first time. What has she arrived into, the poor little thing? Actually, not little exactly, for this fledgeling human is a staggering 15ft (4.5m) long. Australian sculptor Ron Mueck works on his sculpture entitled A Girl at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, Scotland, July 31, REUTERS/David Moir This is no prop from a B-movie but the amazing, distressing, awe-inspiring new work by the hyper-realist sculptor Ron Mueck. A Girl (2006) is the centrepiece of a new show from the National Galleries of Scotland of ten sculptures by Mueck, on display at the Royal Academy of Scottish Art in Edinburgh (there s more room in the latter building for the space-hungry works). It s the first contemporary art show that has been put on there since the galleries were refurbished. At the time of going to press, the baby girl was having every damp hair on her head glued into a series of needle-sized holes by Mueck and his team. The image is grim, joyous and utterly affecting. Its creator a man rather smaller than his enormous baby charge, and rather older at 48 is intensely private and does not give interviews, even in the run-up to a new show. He hails from Melbourne, Australia, the son of toymakers, and worked on television shows for years before getting into special effects for films, famously working on the puppets in Labyrinth, the very silly but now cult 1986 fantasy epic starring David Bowie. Mueck, whose mother-in-law is the artist Paula Rego, then started his own London company making models for advertisements but ditched this after deciding that snaps of his work sucked all the presence out of it. He turned to fine art and sculpture, and his transition from the status of craftsman to that of artist was complete when Charles Saatchi put Dead Dad, a small-scale hyper-real sculpture of his dead and naked father, in the Sensation show at the Royal Academy in Mueck then gained mass appeal with his huge crouching Boy, which was displayed in the Millennium Dome and at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001.

21 August 2, 2006 Page 2 of 2 Mueck has lost none of his momentum. Of the ten works in the Edinburgh show, five were shown earlier this year at the Fondation Cartier in Paris but have never been seen in Britain. They will be shown alongside four earlier works: a small boy that hangs on the wall; Ghost, a 7ft adolescent girl in a swimming costume, borrowed from the Tate; Man in a Boat (2002), Mueck s eeriest work, which places a middle-aged man with a confused look on his face in a boat, as though he is trying to navigate his way through life with a certain amount of puzzlement. It dates from the period when Mueck was artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in London. There will also be the chance to see Mask II ( ), a self-portrait that depicts the artist at his most vulnerable, a decapitated head lying on its side, eyes closed, mouth moist with mucus. Putting on a show of Mueck s work is an outsized challenge for a gallery, as Richard Calvocoressi, the director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, explains. You need the space, he says, simply. Each work is such a one-off, it s quite difficult to include more than one or two in each room. For other artists that make realist sculptures, the point of their work is for them to be mistaken for real people; that s not the case with Mueck. Each of the artist s sculptures is smaller or larger than the real thing. In fact, one of the pieces Wildman (2005), a 9ft sculpture of a naked bearded man clutching the stool he is seated upon occupies an entire gallery. The baby girl is in another. The challenge is to give them the space and get across the scale. They also need to be seen with real human beings to get that scale across, Calvocoressi explains. Unlike other sculptors, who leave the hard work to the art factories, Mueck is said to be extremely hands-on, but still has a small team of up to five assistants to help him complete the painstaking details: moles, follicles, blackheads the tiny marks of humanity. His sources of inspiration are eclectic and those who work with him insist that no work is based solely on one person but rather a mixture of reproductions of works of art, chance encounters, photographs and newspaper cuttings. He has two teenage children, but Susanna Greeves, his project manager for the Edinburgh show, says that none of his giant babies has been exclusively modelled on either. The process of making A Girl sounds almost as exhausting as creating the real thing. The work began at the start of the year with rough sketches on paper and small 3-D clay models and germinated into small maquettes from modelling wax and plaster, a 2ft version in clay, a 15ft version in hardboard, wire and plaster, then a large clay sculpture coated with silicon, and on and on until the polyresin is painted into the mould pieces and the moulds removed to show the fibreglass. Then there s the painting of features and the gluing of the hair. Early on in his career Mueck created a dog, but since then he has concentrated on two-legged mammals. Yet in the catalogue for the show there are pictures of birds on the walls of his studio. Is this the last exhibition before a radical change of direction? It looks likely that he may do birds. He is very interested in animals, says Calvocoressi, guardedly. Greeves is more reserved. He would want to make sure they didn t look like fantasy creatures. The figures are such psychological portraits and it s hard to see how that would be possible with animals. It s a challenge of such scale that Mueck might just pull it off.

22 August 13, 2006 Mortal Contact By Catriona Black, from a longer article Since the grand, airy galleries of the RSA were refurbished three years ago, the National Galleries of Scotland have only used the space for shows of historical painting: Titian, Monet, Landseer and the high-density jumble of last year s Choice exhibition. The venue operates on a time-share basis with its historical occupants the RSA, the SSA and other societies who regularly show contemporary art. But these exhibitions, in line with academy shows of yore, favour a jumble-sale aesthetic. With Ron Mueck comes a different kind of exhibition. Ten monumental works fill seven rooms, the space taken up as much with the figures Ron Mueck, Mask II, 2001, mixed media, 30 3/8 x 46 1/2 x 33 1/2 inches distant gazes as with their physical presence. If a total of 10 works seems like a poor return on the 6 ticket price, consider last year s Mueck show in Paris, where just five exhibits attracted an audience of 110,000. Size does matter, and whether his human figures are larger than life, or disconcertingly small, their emotional power is intensified. Australian-born Mueck has only called himself an artist for 10 years. Before that, he worked in Jim Henson s Creature Shop, the model workshop responsible for the Muppets. This training has enabled Mueck to make human figures with incredible attention to detail; his oversized, gangly teenager is beautifully observed, from the pinkness of her eyes to the cold dapple of her pink and yellow skin. Though all his super-real characters look as if they were, like Duane Hanson s Tourists, cast from human beings, Mueck s approach is embedded in artistic tradition. His figures are sketched and modelled in clay before he makes the final version in polyester resin, inserting real human hair, pore by pore. While Hanson s human replicas are socially incisive, Mueck s examine the broader human condition. Often naked, his pallid figures are awkward and vulnerable. They are seen at key stages in their lives, a long artistic tradition; here are the ages of man for a new generation. Completely accessible, Mueck leaves us with 10 incredibly poignant reminders of our own mortality.