Ron Mueck (b. 1958), sculptor, first attracted widespread attention in 1997, when his poignant work Dead Dad was featured in the landmark exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Royal Academy, London and subsequently shown in Berlin and New York. The Melbourne-born artist started his career as a creative director in children's television before travelling to the USA and the UK to work in the film industry. Settling in London in 1986 he started a company to create models for film and television, and later collaborated with Jim Henson on The Storyteller (1987). His figure of Pinocchio, created for Paula Rego's tableau Spellbound: Art and Film (1996), was seen by collector Charles Saatchi, who commissioned Mueck to create three works for his collection, including Dead Dad. It established Mueck's reputation for the creation of deeply affecting, sculpted human figures rendered from subtly-tinted silicon, resin, fibreglass and synthetic hair, characterised by remarkable verisimilitude and executed on both massive and miniature scale. Mueck held his first solo exhibition at London's d'Offay Gallery in 1998 and in 2000 he was granted a residency at the National Gallery, London, which resulted in works such as Mother and Child (2001), Man in a Boat (2002) and the monumental Pregnant Woman (2002), which is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. His work Boy was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and between late 2002 and in March 2003 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, presented his first Australian solo exhibition. Mueck's work has also been the subject of major exhibitions in Washington DC, Berlin, London and Haarlem, and the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain survey of his work was shown in Paris, Edinburgh, New York, Ottawa, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh and Kanazawa. The National Gallery of Victoria presented Ron Mueck in 2010. Mueck's works are held in a number of major art museums around the world including Tate, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Galleries of Australia, Scotland and Canada.
Purchased 2022
© Polly Borland
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