The Hyperrealism of Ron Mueck

At the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, an exhibition celebrates Ron Mueck, a master of contemporary figurative sculpture. Born in Melbourne in 1958 and based in the United Kingdom, Mueck began his career as a model maker for film and television before devoting himself entirely to sculpture, achieving an astonishing realism through the use of resin, silicone, and pigments. His works, alternating between gigantic and miniature proportions, challenge our perception of the human figure and our relationship with the body. Organized in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the exhibition brings together around ten works, from early masterpieces to recent creations. Among them, Woman with Sticks (2009), depicting a woman carrying a bundle of wood, becomes a symbol of both physical and emotional weight. In each sculpture, the meticulous attention to detail - skin, hair, expression - is never an end in itself but a way to explore human fragility and solitude. Mueck plays with scale and the suspension of time to evoke both empathy and unease: his figures seem to breathe, yet remain frozen in an eternal instant. This tension makes his art so powerful, capable of speaking to a global audience in an era dominated by the virtual.