Visiting the new Ron Mueck exhibition Encounter at the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW) is an unusual experience. Not because of Mueck’s hyperreal sculptures at weird and wonderful scales – we expect that. Rather, for the sheer volume of works shown here.
In this review:
Understanding Mueck in Australia
Audiences are usually lucky to see one or two signature pieces by Mueck, or encounter one of his massive installations, such the Australian favourite, Mass: a room full of steroid-proportioned skulls, first shown at the inaugural NGV Triennial in 2017. Avoiding replication, this exhibition extends audiences beyond this familiar work.
In a coup, Encounter clusters some 15 works – nine of which have never been seen in Australia. This is significant given that the recluse Melbourne-born, UK-based artist has produced fewer than 50 works in three decades, and is one of the most in-demand artists working in our times.
There’s only one work that overlaps with Mueck’s last significant survey in Australia (National Gallery of Victoria, 2010). Understandably, it’s AGNSW’s much-loved Old woman in bed (2002). However, it is presented in the Gallery’s old wing in context with artists that have inspired Mueck – it acts as a kind of calling card for the ticketed show.
Walking through Ron Mueck’s Encounter
Given the idea for the exhibition was seeded by Director Maud Page back in 2017, I love that all that anticipation, the show’s coup status and sheer clout is kicked off with a sculpture whose back is turned to entering visitors.
Pregnant Woman (2002) stands at 252cm, her arms stretched over her head, her feet grounded. One can almost hear her whisper of weariness, ‘here we go again’, her back to the enthusiastic, digital-snapping throngs.
Rather than faced with her heavily-laden belly with child, it is a reminder to look at the small details, to feel the intimate emotions, and consider this exhibition beyond its initial wow-wallop.
Senior Curator Jackie Dunn has worked closely with Mueck and Charlie Clark, his studio manager, to navigate us through a series of sparse clusters, encouraging viewers to pause and slow down.
The first cluster explores the intimacy of relationships: mother and child, tensions in a young couple, the coupling of an older couple in sleep. The ambiguities and complexities of human interaction are circled back to for the final work in the show, Couple Under an Umbrella (2013/2015). Beautifully lit, it is a show stopper.
In between, we are invited into more psychological spaces of the individual, from the haunting place of depression with Dark Place (2018), to the awkwardness of early adulthood, amplified by scale with Ghost (1998/2014), the earthy reality of Woman with Sticks (2009-10) who buckles under her load, and the intimate Crouching Boy in Mirror (1999-2002) a physically and emotionally delicate work of a young boy meeting his own gaze, questioning his own place.
Anchoring this first section is chicken/man (2019) with its magnetic, intense gaze connecting man and animal. The unknowability of this scene – strange and yet so familiar – leaves one asking questions. It is a key work in Mueck’s pivot in material use of silicon to fibreglass, but also bridges humankind and our primitive instincts with the animal world.
It is a beautiful segway to Big Man (2000), with his awkward mass pushed into a corner, and his face a map of frayed expression blending a kind of exhausted resign over his bulk, with annoyance and the brewing of a raging tantrum. The animal is so close to the surface.
Working over-scale or at an intimate scale, Mueck jolts our looking beyond the familiar and draws upon our unsettled emotions, whether that be a sense of care and intimacy, vulnerability or ruffled tensions.
Brave choices that buck expectations
This tension is best played out in AGNSW’s new commission, Havoc (2025) – an over-scale pack of eight wolf-like dogs that snarl at each other, ready to pounce. The viewer is caught in the menacing cross-fire.
A version of this was installed (just three dogs) in Paris to launch the new Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain headquarters in 2023, signalling an enormous shift in the work. It is an incredibly brave (and difficult) position for an artist to turn a practice so distinct, and so in demand, in a different direction, like pivoting an ocean liner in a tight dock.
While Havoc will receive mixed responses – considered not hyperreal enough (whatever that means to popular masses) – it remains a resolved and complex piece that draws on Mueck’s incredible material dexterity and tacit knowledge, first hand-carving each of these dogs in clay and finished them in resin.
Sitting within a separate space central to the exhibition, Havoc riffs off current global tensions and asks can we still be sensitive in a world that is led by aggressive dominance? What are our parameters of acceptance?
He invites viewers to recognise their primal urges – whether the urge to reach out to verify an illusion, our animal instincts of self-preservation or just a shared empathy. It is that capacity to tap primal feelings that are palpable for audiences, and the reason Mueck is such a revered artist.
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Mueck in an era of machine generated realities
When we think of stagecraft – it is all about timing and lighting – to create a drama that is so much larger than life, that it feels real. Similarly, we have this fascination in Australia with portraiture – especially hyperrealist portraiture – that is a fusion of voyeurism, mastership, and a lure of trickery. Encounter – the show’s title – deflects this kind of smoke and mirrors ta-da moment, over nurturing genuine connection.
Apart from the social condition of the world, this exhibition is also timely in the way it anchors human expression in our world of simulated realities and machine generated humanity.
You will notice in this show that none of Mueck’s subjects look us in the eye. This is not about us. It is about them. And through them, we find ourselves.
Encounters will undoubtedly draw huge crowds and flood our social media channels. It will touch people, and it will be lasting. And, just maybe, it will also remind people that through our actions of kindness we might contribute to lightening the burden of this world.
Ron Mueck: Encouner is showing at the Art Gallery of NSW’s Naad B building, 6 December through to 12 April. Part of the Sydney International Art Series 2025–26, it is a ticketed exhibition.
