This event is an opportunity for Cartier Foundation to continue the dialogue with this exceptional artist revealed to the French public in 2005, whose meticulous sculptures are carefully created. The exhibition will feature in particular Mass (2017), a monumental installation made up of one hundred giant skulls.
Created for the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), this artwork is being shown outside Australia for the first time
While many artists strive to glamorize the real world through their depictions and imitations of it, Ron wants to depict reality with all its conflicts. The artist often aims to present his characters at key moments in their imagined lives, covering the mysterious moments such as birth and death. Ron often draws on his own memories, dreams and everyday experiences to portray his subjects with extraordinary compassion, injecting a little of his own personality into each piece. In general, the artist usually spends over a year conceiving and creating each figure in his workshop, allowing maximum time to find the perfect solutions on both an emotional and technical front. Ultimately, he is able to enrich every feature of his artwork with astonishing detail, successfully emphasizing each sculpture with the desired emotion, as is the case with this installation of large skulls.
Born in Melbourne in 1958, Ron Mueck lives and works in the UK. He is famous for his human figures whose startling realism is contradicted by their sense of proportion. After a career of mannequins and puppets for cinema and television, his artistic career began in 1996 with a sculpture of Pinocchio commissioned by the artist Paula Rego. A year later, his work Dead Dad (1996-1997) was featured in the exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection (at the Royal Academy of Arts, London). In 2001, his sculpture Boy (1999) was presented at the 49th Venice Biennale.
