Ron Mueck

Mueck's human figures are always technically perfect, absolutely realistic, deliberately undersized or oversized. He first models them in clay and then takes a hollow cast of which he fills with silicone or fibreglass. The finished models show delicate networks of veins, fine hairs, they even seem to breathe. Viewers are touched and set thinking by the emotional quality of figures like "Pregnant Woman" or "Dead Dad" - created by the artist after the death of his father. Mueck dazzled the public at the Venice Biennale in 2001 with his five metre tall sculpture "Boy". Harald Szeemann called the sculpture "the sphinx of the exhibition", and it soon became its landmark. The monumental, crouching figure of a youth makes a vulnerable, defensive impression, and yet, its watchful eye seems to miss nothing.