Taste
Voorlinden presents the largest retrospective ever of Ron Mueck
This summer and next autumn, Voorlinden presents the largest retrospective ever of Ron Mueck. The Australian artist is known for his extremely realistic sculptures and his exploration of scale and reduction.
This summer and next autumn, Voorlinden will present the largest retrospective of Ron Mueck ever. The Australian artist has become known for his extremely realistic sculptures and his play with scaling and reduction. Director Suzanne Swarts: “It is really special that we have brought these works together and are creating his largest retrospective ever.”
Ron Mueck is known for his realistic sculptures. His gift did not come out of the blue: his mother used to make dolls and he himself worked as a doll maker and player for twenty years, including The Muppet Show en Jim Henson's Labyrinth (1986). His works not only appear lifelike from crown to toenail, but are also charged with emotions. As Ghost (1998), which portrays an insecure teenage girl going through a growth spurt. “Although I pay a lot of attention to the outside, I especially want to capture life on the inside,” says Ron Mueck, who has built up an oeuvre of 25 works over more than 48 years. Fifteen of these are now on display in Voorlinden, three of which are from our own collection: Couple under an Umbrella (2013), one of the permanent highlights of the Wassenaars museum and the first work by Mueck that consists of more than one person; Man in Blankets (2000), colloquially also called 'baby with a beard', because an adult man as a swaddled baby; and Big baby (1996-'97), one of his first works as an autonomous artist.
Although Mueck is best known for his unparalleled representation of reality, in recent years he has focused more on form, composition and gesture. You can clearly see this in his most recent work En garde (2023): three dogs, sculpturally designed, without the meticulous details that characterize his previous work. The solo exhibition starts on the Voorlinden estate with deadweight (2021), the first sculpture he made from cast iron. This imposing skull, weighing no less than a ton, is a precursor to the room-filling installation Mass (2016-17), in which you make your way through a memento mori landscape of a hundred skulls, each one by one meter. Director Suzanne Swarts: “It is really special that we have brought these works together and are creating his largest retrospective ever.” On display from June 29 to November 17.
