As the Art Gallery of NSW’s summer blockbuster is installed, the most vexed question facing the team is how to secure the limbs of the old woman relaxing on the beach underneath a colourful oversized parasol.
Sculptor Ron Mueck is known for creating massive scaled models – and miniatures – of the human form. Body hair, skin blemishes, surface spider veins, and the drag and sag of an ageing body are meticulously captured in solitary poses and tableau scenes that draw big crowds wherever he exhibits in the world.
It takes two gloved handed staff to carry each of the arms, made of a timber frame overlaid with a silicone moulded skin to fibreglass, then hand painted in the minutest detail. Body hairs are attached one by one. Figures take years to make.
“I think it is important when you look at the sculpture at the end, you are not aware of how it’s made because that dispels the magic,” says Charlie Clarke, exhibitions director of the Ron Mueck studio, overseeing the installation of Couple Under an Umbrella. “All of these people, this equipment and everything we’ve got around, you don’t want to know any of it has been here because if you are aware of it you break the spell.”
When the installers step back to observe their handiwork, they see fragility and tenderness.
“You see the wedding ring locked into her skin. You see his reliance on her. That speaks to me of a long marriage more than it speaks to me about the beach,” curator Jackie Dunn says. “And I wonder what has passed between them in that look between him and her.”
Mueck remains something of an outsider in the contemporary art world – are his works sculpture, props or special effects? No one doubts their emotional potency. Quietly observing reactions to a single Mueck work of an old woman curled in a foetal position installed in the gallery’s old courts last week, Dunn said the second visitor of the day was totally overcome.
“I asked her, ‘Are you okay? Is it that you have lost someone recently?’ And she said, ‘No, it’s not really that. It’s just its sheer beauty’. That’s what had knocked her sideways. And she said, ‘I don’t know if I can see anything else today’. These were her words, I swear.”
The gallery has fingers crossed Ron Mueck: Encounter will be the shot in the arm it needs to wrap up a year in which Maud Page succeeded Michael Brand as the gallery’s first ever female director. It fell to Page to axe 44 roles, to plug a $7.5 million shortfall with affected staff departing as Mueck opens his biggest ever Australian show.
Some 2.4 million people visited the gallery last financial year, up 17 per cent, but paid attendance was less than a quarter of that (471,415), bringing in $11 million in revenue. It’s stunning show, Magritte, translated into 135,726 tickets sold, and Chinese multimedia artist, Cao Fei, drew less than half that to her show, My City is Yours.
South of the border, National Gallery of Victoria’s Yayoi Kusama show became the highest-attended ticketed art show in Australian history with 570,537 visitors. Mueck will open in the same week as NGV rolls out its next blockbuster pairing British designer Vivienne Westwood and Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo.
Mueck’s recent exhibition in Seoul earlier this year attracted 100,000 visitors in just 20 days, said Page, and is expected to captivate local audiences.
“There’s no formula for success in exhibitions – if there were, AI could program for us,” Page says. “But with Mueck, it’s all about pure human emotion. His sculptures hold an extraordinary power: we know we shouldn’t stare, yet we can’t look away. Each piece radiates an uncanny, slightly odd story that you feel first in your gut, and then your mind turns over, trying to explain.”
The Melbourne-born son of German toymakers, Mueck worked in children’s television and with Jim Henson until a landmark survey of works at London’s Royal Academy in 1997 by collector Charles Saatchi made his name. Mueck’s intimate meditation on mortality, a smaller-than-life-size figure of his naked deceased father, caused a sensation.
The Museum of Contemporary Art staged Mueck’s last Sydney show two decades ago. Ron Mueck: Encounter displays 15 works, almost one third of the artist’s total career output.
Encounter includes one new work, Havoc, which features a pack of snarling barking dogs rounding on each other, a commentary on these conflict-ridden times.
“You’d be hard-pressed to find another artist who has the sculptural and the painting skills that Ron has, to achieve these dogs in resin that feels like they are a carved Baroque stone work,” Dunn says. “This is someone who has something important to say.”
Ron Mueck: Encounter runs from December 6, 2025 to April 12, 2026
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