Sculpting Skin & Bones in Forms Great & Small

There is little mystery to the dramatic first impression of Ron Mueck’s art. His fiberglass and silicone nude sculptures startle with their verisimilitude to actual human bodies, describing in exquisite detail physical minutiae like nose hair, toenails, veins, stubble, and the soft pink flesh of nipples and lips. Mr. Mueck’s realism is so tactile that it arrests viewers, forces them to look closely, and often elicits audible gasps of recognition. This visceral reaction is heightened by an equally palpable sense of surprise, a result of the sculpture’s lone deviation from naturalism, its exaggerated scale.But the true splendor of the work — the reason you are likely to linger on after your initial “wow” has faded to contemplative silence — is how this physical nakedness gives way to an impression of nakedness of the soul. Like all great portraitists, Mr. Mueck captures essential truths about his subjects’ inner experience, even at the moments of birth and death. For all its physicality, his art says as much about the human psyche as about the texture of skin and hair.The Australian-born, London-based Mr. Mueck honed his craft as a modeland puppet-maker for television and film, including “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show.” In the mid-1990s, he turned to fine art, and his first sculpture, “Dead Dad” (1996–97), became an instant success when it was purchased by advertising magnate Charles Saatchi and included in “Sensation,” an exhibition of his collection of work by Young British Artists. After making its debut in London in 1997, the show traveled to Berlin and the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Although it gained notoriety for antic installations by Damien Hirst, lurid confessionals by Tracey Emin, and the controversy over Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary,” the exhibition was less memorable than advertised, too content to substitute fleeting sensationalism for lasting aesthetic experience.The work of Mr. Mueck, however, was a notable exception, and the 12-sculpture exhibition that marks his return to the Brooklyn Museum more than lives up to his early promise. “Dead Dad,” here again, is as wrenching as ever. This tribute to the artist’s deceased father presents the prone body of an old (though not elderly) man, his eyes closed, his body slight and frail, his appendages limp. Accentuating the pathos of the dead figure is his tiny scale. Just a few feet long, the sculpture bears adult features, yet its size suggests a sleeping child.Beyond the stunning verisimilitude, manipulation of scale is a second hallmark of Mr. Mueck’s work. In every piece, size is exaggerated, a sculpture’s gigantism or drawfism essential to its meaning. If “Dead Dad” illustrates how death diminishes, “A Girl” (2006), his most recent work, shows birth doing the very opposite. Here is a giant, nearly 17-foot-long sculpture of a newborn baby girl, her fallopian tube cut but not yet tied into the knot of a navel, her cheek, chest, and legs still bearing goop from the womb, her face contorted in a pained expression that portends a burst of tears. These two works, which bookend the artist’s career to date, express the paradoxes of human life at its beginning and end points: the monstrous presence of the newborn baby and the childlike tenderness of the adult corpse, the torment of new life and the serenity of death.Another piece to take on big themes, “Man in Boat” (2005), places a small man (a few feet tall) on the front seat of a wooden rowboat. Naked and middleaged, he sits with his arms crossed above a slight potbelly; he leans to the side, an intense look of skepticism creasing his face. The boat is seaworthy, yet battered; like the man, it is adrift in the sea of middle age. But just as this potential meaning comes into focus, another emerges — the small naked man in the belly of a large vessel conjures an image of infant and mother — and the sculpture’s metaphorical associations spread outward.In general, though, startling forthrightness characterizes Mr. Mueck’s art. The enormous, rotund, hairless “Big Man” (2000) sits in a corner of the gallery, an uninhibited meditation on the onset of old age. Meanwhile, the tiny delicate “Spooning Couple”(2005) presents a pair of lovers — he wears only a T-shirt, she just panties — who together resemble a baby reclining in the fetal position, a tangle of innocence and experience. Strands of hair fall across both of their cheeks; several days’ worth of stubble also covers his. The two figures wear dreamy looks, but the suggestion is disengagement, not blithe contentedness, as if emotional laziness protects them from painful truth.While these two lovers are lost in private reverie, other subjects seem to directly address the viewer. The tiny elderly women in “Two Women” (2005), the show’s only fully clothed figures, interrupt their conversation to peer outward, one meeting our gaze with a warm, though weary, squint, the other distracted, the dim fright of dementia clouding over her eyes. The fully naked “Wild Man” (2005) — a giant with a long brown beard and flowing hair, who tensely clings to the edge of the table of which he sits — eyes us with unmistakable terror, while the enormous, 20-foot-long woman lying “In Bed” (2005) chills with Olympian disapproval. Her expression suggests subdued concern, as if she has just been told of troubling but expected news, yet her size amplifies this disappointment into something almost unbearable.When confronted with artwork this naked and self-conscious, the viewer faces something like the choice that awaits us during the most intimate of human interactions. What is at stake is nothing less than the honesty and openness with which we encounter our fellow human beings. One possibility is to look at Mr. Mueck’s sculptures as we all too often view one another, with cold objectivity, observing a phenomenon, a curiosity, as opposed to an individual flesh-and-blood human being.Or we can follow the more challenging alternative, which will awaken our own sense of vulnerability — the path of empathy. Mr. Mueck’s remarkable art suggests that the development of a genuine capacity for feeling and understanding is no less arduous a process than the painstaking one by which he sculpts each work. But the results, he simultaneously assures us, are just as startling.Until February 4 (200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, 718-638-5000).

Sculpting Skin & Bones in Forms Great & Small

Sculpting Skin & Bones in Forms Great & Small

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