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Ron Mueck is a really big visual artist.
Ha ha.
Okay, that’s only half true. He can also be a pretty small visual artist, and I found this out at Canada’s National Gallery right at home in Ottawa during an exhibit of Mueck’s work on March 16th, 2007.
Ron Mueck is a sculptor from Australia. He used to work in tv and film as a puppet maker and prop creator before making the jump to visual artist. His work is super-realistic and oddly sized and is invariably of people. The gallery owns one of his pieces: a hugely oversized baby’s head that sits at the entrance of the modern art collection. I’ve always liked the bulbous mass of latex with its monstrous eyelashes and deep baby-wrinkles and I was interested in seeing more.
And I certainly wasn’t disappointed. The man makes giant humanoids that are humbling to cower beneath and miniature ones that are fascinating to loom over. If not for the almost grotesque size incongruity one would be convinced that these were real people. In my view it’s precisely this juxtaposition of common sense that is the fascination in Mueck’s work. Your brain sees something that can only be real but can’t be real at the same time. It would be like seeing at a stegosaurus in a zoo.
A tiny naked man lays on a slab; another nude man – this one giant – sits brooding in the corner, his head almost touching the ceiling while a baby fresh from the womb takes up as much floor space as a small school bus. Another oversized male subject sits in one half of a rowboat while an enormous head reclines sleeping on the floor, seeming almost to drool.
Really, I can’t remember enjoying an exhibit by an artist almost completely unknown to me this much, with the exception of Norval Morrisseau.
Todd Man Out 