James Cohan Gallery
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James Cohan Gallery 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 Australian sculptor Ron Mueck works on his sculpture production company in London. entitled “A Girl” at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, Scotland, July 31, 2006. He also worked on David Bowie's film, Labyrinth. 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. 533 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NEW YORK 10001 TEL 212 714 9500 FAX 212 714 9510 James Cohan Gallery 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. 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 ft- long 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 Artist Ron Mueck puts the last finishing touches on It’s a Girl 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. 533 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NEW YORK 10001 TEL 212 714 9500 FAX 212 714 9510 James Cohan Gallery 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 1997. 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. 533 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK NEW YORK 10001 TEL 212 714 9500 FAX 212 714 9510 James Cohan Gallery 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.