{"id":225935,"date":"2026-01-10T01:03:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T01:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/225935\/"},"modified":"2026-01-10T01:03:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T01:03:11","slug":"ron-mueck-takes-a-new-direction-with-encounter-at-agnsw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/225935\/","title":{"rendered":"Ron Mueck takes a new direction with Encounter at AGNSW"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walking in to Encounter, Ron Mueck\u2019s retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, one is immediately confronted by a\u00a0bum.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a significant rump, too. The sculpture of a woman is two-and-a-half-metres tall, with its back facing the entrance to the exhibition.<\/p>\n

The effect, and presumably the intention, is literal and explicit: a larger-than-life, cheeky invitation to not take yourself, or the idea of art, too seriously.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to appreciate the craft of Mueck\u2019s hyperrealism; the disquiet and uncanny effect his sculptures produce are visceral and immediate. He plays with detail and the idea of scale. Some sculptures are titanic and others are heartbreakingly miniaturised.<\/p>\n

Mueck\u2019s exhibitions have broken attendance records in Brazil and South Korea, and Encounter is the equal-largest collection of\u00a0his work ever assembled, bringing 15 of his 50-odd sculptures to Sydney for the summer. It\u2019s the first solo show he\u2019s held in the city in two decades, and the two newest works here \u2013 This Little Piggy (2023-25) and Havoc (2025) \u2013 have never been seen before. Seven more of these sculptures are being shown in Australia for the first time.<\/p>\n

The irreverence in Mueck\u2019s work draws crowds, but it is the opaque angles of his thinking that make his work most interesting.<\/p>\n

To walk around that bum and view the front of the sculpture \u2013 Pregnant Woman (2002) \u2013 is to be surprised with something confronting and challenging. The shock of her swollen abdomen, looming over your head, is provocative in an entirely different way.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the core of Encounter and of Mueck\u2019s work in general. With this exhibition, the Australian-born, England-based sculptor is inviting the viewer to pause, look, reflect, and look again.<\/p>\n

Some of the works reward the viewer\u2019s voyeurism, with attention to detail not visible to a passing glance. The figures in Young Couple (2013) are sweetly innocent \u2013 the tenderness and terror and endless yearning of a first affection. Yet that impression belies something sinister that closer inspection will\u00a0reveal.<\/p>\n

The scarred hands of Woman with Sticks (2009-10) speak to a mythological endurance present in a very quotidian, unprotected body. Man in Blankets (2000) requires the viewer to loom over the work, hovering like a parent who wants to admire their child without disturbing them.<\/p>\n

In fact, getting in close to the works is part of the point. AGNSW is playing with fire here \u2013 the invigilators have clearly been briefed to stay alert with this one, as visitors frequently get\u00a0too personal with the works.<\/p>\n

Mike Hewson\u2019s work in the Tank downstairs, The Key\u2019s Under the Mat, is explicitly tactile and child-friendly. At first glance, Encounter can similarly seem almost like a haptic playground, a place for touch and smell as well as sight, yet it is the opposite.<\/p>\n

None of Mueck\u2019s figures are really met \u2013 one can only observe and reflect. Sometimes that attention is unwelcome. To be in the presence of Crouching Boy in the Mirror (1999-2002) or the lanky teenager of Ghost (1998\/2014) is almost painful.<\/p>\n

Standing more than two metres tall, sallow and sullen, what she clearly wants is to be left alone and unseen. Yet here she is, awkwardly exposed, as though at a public mole-mapping: subject to the judgement of viewers, their perusal or casual dismissal. It\u2019s a\u00a0cruelty to observe her.<\/p>\n

In looking back, he\u2019s moving forward, and there\u2019s the hint of an exciting new direction for the sculptor.<\/p>\n

The similarly epic Big Man (2000) presents a terrifying bulk of flesh. The giant man squats sulking in the corner of the exhibition with a childish sneer of resentment. Like Cormac McCarthy\u2019s Judge Holden \u2013 or Lucian Freud\u2019s painting of a naked Leigh Bowery, And the Bridegroom (1993), held in the Naala Nura building \u2013 the corporeality of this figure \u2013 colossal, meaty, hairless \u2013 is unsettling. His embodied humanity, his presence, is threatening in a way that extends into the inhuman.<\/p>\n

Encounter invites visitors to look at something static, something private, blown up or under the microscope, and make it public and dynamic. It asks whether it\u2019s possible to understand the interiority or life-world of another being simply by viewing it, whether perceiving is the same as experiencing, and whether the image of the thing is the same as the thing in itself.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s much visible and much hidden in these works. Dark Place (2018), which features a massive, entombed head as a form of portraiture, both brings us in to witness the subject\u2019s pain while keeping us distant from ever really understanding it.<\/p>\n

chicken\/man (2019) is an absurd kitchen-table meeting between a man in his underwear and a chicken, reminiscent of Jan \u0160vankmajer\u2019s Food (1992). It could be a confrontation or a conversation, or simply a\u00a0chance meeting of two strangers.<\/p>\n

In some ways, Encounter is a grotesquerie of waxy flesh and faux intimacy. It could substitute for a visit to Madame Tussauds \u2013 come and take a selfie with Jackie Chan, or Princess Diana, or the King of Pop. It\u2019s also eerily similar to a Gunther von Hagens exhibition, in which plastinated human corpses are presented sliced into cross-sections, or arranged in tableaux vivants without their skin; cords and organs and meat on display.<\/p>\n

That hint of ghoulishness is deliberate. Depicting the reality of flesh, as in Hans Holbein the Younger\u2019s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521), or Caravaggio\u2019s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601-02), blurs the line between the holy and the mundane. There\u2019s the offer of transubstantiation here, if you want it: you, with all your sags and wrinkles and weird bits, are also something divine.<\/p>\n

Mueck wants you to know there\u2019s more here than the spectacle of the human body or the gimmick of perfect mimicry. The viewer is a collaborator in the work, a participant in the encounter. By placing oneself in and among these people, the visitor becomes part of the moment that Mueck has captured. By responding to it, the viewer completes the artwork.<\/p>\n

The more recent works continue the fascination with scale and embodiment, but the practice of the work has been made visible. Skeuomorphic design elements are left in Havoc and This Little Piggy \u2013 thumbprints and chisel marks, deliberate signatures or vestigial reminders of the artifice behind their creation. In doing so, Mueck reminds the viewer there\u2019s a process and a craft involved.<\/p>\n

The pack of snarling dogs in Havoc resemble CAD files, with the blocky shapes and over-smooth geometry of computer-aided design. Their grey colour emulates 3D-printed resin or cement, and the cartoonish proportions and lines are evocative of Warhammer miniatures. The large scale of the work makes the figures into statues or gargoyles.<\/p>\n

These dogs of war are arranged in a circle, without any clear provocation or sense of allegiances. Everyone\u2019s just angry at everyone else.<\/p>\n

This Little Piggy, by contrast, is a set of tiny maquettes depicting men doing the work of slaughtering a pig. Recalling Mueck\u2019s background \u2013 his German parents, immigrants to Australia, were toymakers \u2013 the figures are more doll-like than the photorealistic sculptures of his earlier years.<\/p>\n

That quality is contrasted with the violence of the models. The men are casually brutal, scrimmaging over the pig in its last moment of desperation. Havoc and Piggy are more explicitly morbid and mobile than the earlier pieces and interested in something broader and more social than the one-to-one interactions in most of Encounter.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Mueck is angrier than when he got started, or perhaps the world is uglier now, or maybe he\u2019s just seeing it differently. Whatever the case, the new works also display some atavism in his techniques, a gentle move towards abstraction.<\/p>\n

When the simulation is perfect, as most of Mueck\u2019s work is, it can seem immaculate, as though it arrived fully formed. Showing the work involved, by leaving in imperfections, puts a spotlight on the intention and effect.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a new phase for Mueck, in which he seems to be less interested in exact simulacra and more in representation. In looking back, he\u2019s moving forward, and there\u2019s the hint of an exciting new direction for the sculptor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ron Mueck: Encounter is showing at the Art\u00a0Gallery of New South Wales until April 12. <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

ARTS DIARY<\/p>\n

EXHIBITION The Hooligans<\/a><\/p>\n

White Rabbit Gallery, Gadigal Country\/Sydney, until May 17<\/p>\n

CIRCUS Cirque Alice<\/a><\/p>\n

Her Majesty\u2019s Theatre, Kaurna Yarta\/Adelaide, until January 18<\/p>\n

FESTIVAL NGV Kids Summer Festival<\/a><\/p>\n

National Gallery of Victoria, Naarm\/Melbourne, until January 16<\/p>\n

MUSICAL Annie<\/a><\/p>\n

Lyric Theatre, Meanjin\/Brisbane, until January 31<\/p>\n

PHOTOGRAPHY\u00a0Edge of the Earth<\/a><\/p>\n

Western Australian Museum, Whadjuk Noongar Country\/Perth, until April 27<\/p>\n

Last Chance<\/p>\n

MUSIC Cygnet Folk Festival<\/a><\/p>\n

melukerdee Country, Cygnet, Tasmania, until January 11<\/p>\n

\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n January 10, 2026 as “Close encounters”.<\/p>\n

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