After making puppets and special effects for the movie industry, in 1996 the Australian artist Ron Mueck started developing a strange and powerful personal corpus that has profoundly renewed the question of contemporary sculpture.
The book published for the exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in November 2005 explores a fascinating yet disturbing hyperrealist work between the real world and a phantasmagorical realm. While the illusion of life is rendered by perfect imitation of the tiniest details of the human body, such as veins, wrinkles, or body hair, the sheer gigantism or smallness of the frequently disproportionate sculptures extracts them from the field of realism.
Through these inward-looking, prostrated characters, dozing off or on the alert, the immense subtlety of Ron Mueck’s work lies in the evocation of personal, private worlds that shift the stakes of artistic realism into the psychological sphere.

text by Robert Rosenblum

Ron Mueck
Publisher: Fondation Cartier pour l´art contemporain, Paris, 2005
Hardback, 22 x 28 cm, 120 pages, 90 color illustrations
Bilingual version French / English
Distribution in France: Actes Sud, Arles
ISBN: 978-27427-5871-5
Price: 30 euros