LONDON.- Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac announced that Ron Mueck is joining the gallery and his first exhibition will take place in their London gallery in October 2020. Some of the artist's most celebrated sculptures will be included, as well as recent, unseen work.

The artist’s first exhibition in London in almost a decade will span his career from 1997 through to the present. The show will be mounted in collaboration with Anthony d’Offay, who gave Ron Mueck his first solo exhibition in 1998, followed by a show in 2000. Since closing his galleries that year, d’Offay has continued to represent Ron Mueck, in partnership with Hauser & Wirth from 2011, including a solo exhibition in their London galleries in 2012.

Ron Mueck’s meticulously sculpted figures, ranging from the minute to the monumental, each reflect an inner world of private feelings with unsettling power. The artist’s intimate, understated meditations on universal experiences of compassion, vulnerability, fear and loss, invite each viewer to reflect on their own. Mueck has shown himself to be a major sculptor whose work elicits an immediate emotional response, by using all the traditional elements of his medium: pose, gesture, facial expression, scale and realism.

Ron Mueck’s virtuoso technical skill and poet’s sensibility in his communication of the human condition have seen him produce some of the most distinctive and moving contemporary sculpture of the last 25 years. We are extremely happy to be working with him. – Thaddaeus Ropac

His work can also be compared to that of contemporary realist painters, in particular Lucian Freud… Mr. Mueck differs from such artists, however, in his empathetic involvement with his subjects, who seem to embody, in one way or another, the challenges and perils of the human condition. – The New York Times

Ron Mueck was born to German parents in Melbourne, Australia, in 1958, and has since lived and worked in the UK. Having begun his career in the world of film and television, Mueck’s move into fine art was initiated by a collaboration with Paula Rego at the Hayward Gallery in 1996. A year later, his sculpture Dead Dad, a three-foot representation of the artist’s deceased father, became the standout star of the era-defining Sensation exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. This landmark group show established Ron Mueck as one of the most important artists of his generation.

In 2000, Mueck was invited to spend two years as artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in London, with a remit to make work in response to the permanent collection. The sculptures created during that time were presented in a solo exhibition at the National Gallery in 2003.

Ron Mueck might seem to have little in common with, say, Rembrandt and Raphael. But his meditations on birth and motherhood provide a modern foil for those many great works from the past which deal with the same theme.– Charles Saumarez Smith

Mueck has continued to have solo exhibitions in some of the world’s most prominent art galleries and museums, which have toured Europe, the Americas, the Far East and Australia. His sculptures have also been seen in group shows around the world. In 2017, Mueck was invited to create a new work for the inaugural NGV Triennial in Melbourne. The resulting installation Mass, one hundred giant skulls piled high amongst the gilt-framed paintings in the museum’s collection of eighteenth-century art, is his most monumental work to date.