These are not the kind of dogs you greet with a whistle and a pat. Snapping, snarling and monstrously large, the packs of charcoal-grey canines that face off in Ron Mueck’s newest work, Havoc (2025), are frankly terrifying. All pricked ears, tense musculature and dagger-like teeth, Havoc makes its global debut at the Art Gallery of New South Wales this summer – a commentary on the fear, alienation and pack mentality that shapes our current climate.
The animal kingdom is relatively new territory for this UK-based Australian artist, best known for his hyperreal sculptures of humans at their most vulnerable. Many of these are now on show at Ron Mueck: Encounter, which opened on 6 December. It’s his first Sydney exhibition in more than 20 years and the largest ever shown in this country.
Mueck’s signature move is using scale as a window into a state of being, amplifying emotions such as postpartum exhaustion, adolescent self-consciousness and private grief to offer a deeper connection with the viewer. In Ghost (1998/2014), a teenage girl in a swimming costume shivers and slouches against a wall. Her posture is familiar, but her size – a commanding two metres tall – is anything but. The discomfort she feels in her own skin is palpable.
More ambiguous is Couple Under an Umbrella (2013/2015), depicting an enormous pair of middle-aged beachgoers sprawled under a coloured sun umbrella, dwarfing the onlooking visitors. Is it the sight of their sagging, wrinkled bodies that makes the couple feel like a spectacle? Or does their easy intimacy suggest they’ve simply built a world of their own? Each absorbed in their own thoughts, they appear to be oblivious to the world around them.
1gKri0zz1e7vgc9L4xVl6FtdX3t2xjcfmfAWVK2it5IsIntimacy, magnified
Mueck has explored relationships – with one another and with ourselves – since his earliest days as an artist. The first of his works to catch the eye of an art-hungry public in 1990s London was Dead Dad (1996-97), which he later said was created from imagination and memories of his own father. Included in the 1997 exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Dead Dad is widely considered to have stolen the show – no mean feat, considering it was shown alongside one of Damien Hirst’s sharks, a Tracey Emin installation that got tongues wagging, and work by other YBAs, including Rachel Whiteread, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Jenny Saville.
While many of his contemporaries caused a stir, the honesty and humanity in Mueck’s work resonated with viewers. Many were moved to tears. Since then, some of Mueck’s most familiar artworks have hovered around either birth or death, the twin extremes of human existence.
The making of an artist
Mueck began his career in puppetry, before working for the legendary Jim Henson on productions including Starboppers and Puppetman and creating the special effects for the David Bowie film Labyrinth. In 1996 he ventured into the art world when he created a figure, Pinocchio, for the painter Paula Rego. It was spotted by collector and gallerist Charles Saatchi, who became a long-time supporter of Mueck’s work, and offered him a place in the Sensation show.
As a puppet-maker, Mueck was tasked with creating new characters from scratch, but as an artist, it’s the verisimilitude that makes his work so compelling. Each eyelid, toenail and strand of hair is so believable that when Pregnant Woman (2002) made its debut at the National Gallery in London, the British Medical Journal published an appraisal of its realism. The painstaking nature of his work means he has made fewer than 50 sculptures in the past three decades.
It’s no surprise that Mueck’s process is as fascinating as the final result. As a companion piece to the Encounter exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a new publication reflects on the making of Havoc, tracing the process from initial sketches and models to the final, fearsome result.
Ron Mueck: Encounter is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 6 December 2025 to 12 April 2026. Book your tickets.