Ron Mueck valuation
Australian sculptor of hyperreal human figures, startlingly too large or too small, from Dead Dad to Mass.
Ron Mueck was born in Melbourne in 1958 to German parents, grew up in the family business of puppetry and doll-making and worked first in Australian children's television and then in film and advertising; he made and performed the creature Ludo in Jim Henson's Labyrinth in 1986.
What a work by Ron Mueck is worth
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Bio
Ron Mueck was born in Melbourne in 1958 to German parents, grew up in the family business of puppetry and doll-making and worked first in Australian children's television and then in film and advertising; he made and performed the creature Ludo in Jim Henson's Labyrinth in 1986. In 1996 Paula Rego asked him to make a small figure of Pinocchio for Spellbound, her exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, and the next year Dead Dad, a silicone figure of his father, naked and at about half life size, was one of the most talked-about works in Sensation at the Royal Academy. His figures, of silicone, fibreglass and resin with real hair, are made over months with complete realism of skin, pores and veins, but never at human scale: a giant crouching boy, a new-born baby several metres long, a tiny old woman in bed. They concentrate on birth, ageing, vulnerability and death, and on private moods rather than public action. He was Associate Artist at the National Gallery in London from 2000 to 2002, and lives and works in Britain.
He works slowly and has made relatively few sculptures, many of them now in museums, so very few come up. Any work, including smaller pieces, maquettes and studies, needs a clear record from the studio or from Anthony d'Offay or Thaddaeus Ropac. Silicone discolours, softens and attracts dust with age, and hair and surfaces can be damaged by handling, so a condition report by a conservator who knows these materials is essential.
Melbourne, Labyrinth and Sensation
His first solo exhibition was at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in London in 1998. Boy, a crouching figure about five metres high, stood in the Millennium Dome and then in the Venice Biennale of 2001, and is now at ARoS in Aarhus.
Mass, a hundred giant skulls piled among the 18th-century paintings of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, was made for the museum's first triennial in 2017 and is his largest work. The Fondation Cartier in Paris has given him several exhibitions, the first in 2005.
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