Ron Mueck's sculpture and Humanism

Mask II (2002) Ron Mueck

A girl (2006) Ron Mueck

1. Mueck's sculpture is described as 'hyper-real'. Define the meaning of this term and apply it to his work.

The term Hyper-real has been used to describe artists who attempt to create an extreme sense of visual similarity between a subject or model, and their work. Hyper-real derives from the genre of Hyperrealism which is using the method of painting or sculpture to resemble something of a similar class to a high-resolution photograph.

Mueck’s Mask II (2002) and A girl (2006) would both be described as hyper-real because with the very technical skill he acquires, Mueck has applied accurate detail and physicality to the sculptures, and as a result, they successfully resembled very life-like human figures.

2. Mueck is not interested in making life size sculpture. Find out why he is more interested in working with the scale of the figure which is not life size, and mention 2 works which use scale that is either larger or smaller than life.
Mueck separates himself from other realists by often working in a scale which is abnormal and not of life size. This method interests him because he believes working in a life size scale would take away the psychological experience of his some unique sculptures. The scale of his work alters between being undersized or oversized. This manipulation with scale is an intentional attempt to startle viewers.

Boy (2000), a five meter high sculpture of a young boy crouching. There are a few attributes of this sculpture that would startle and/or intrigue viewers. One being Mueck’s use of abnormal scale, but another being the subject - a young boy characterized to be much larger than your average adult, and another aspect being the thought of the size of the sculpture if the boy wasn’t crouching.

A New York Times article describes In Bed (2005) as a 21 foot long “colossal tableau” and goes on to explain “its size distracts from its emotional intensity”.