- Woman with Shopping
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Ron Mueck draws upon memories, reveries, and everyday experience as he approaches his subjects with extraordinary empathy. His intimate, understated sculptures portray birth and death, love and fear, vulnerability and compassion, prompting viewers to reflect upon their own experiences and those of others. Typically spending more than a year conceiving and making each figure, Mueck captures every physical detail with an astonishing degree of verisimilitude. The naturalism of his work, however, is undercut by the artist’s calculated play with scale: monumental figures can fill a gallery, while others stand no more than three feet high. In a rare interview from 2003, Mueck explained: “I never made life-size figures because it never seemed to be interesting. We meet life-size people every day. [Altering the scale] makes you take notice in a way that you wouldn’t do with something that’s just normal.”
Woman with Shopping began as a single moment observed in the real world. While riding a bus near his North London studio, Mueck caught sight of a woman on a street corner, laden with an orange grocery bag in each hand and an infant cradled under her oversized coat, waiting for the traffic light to turn green. He immediately sketched these figures on the back of his bus ticket, the only scrap of paper at hand. Over the following year, Mueck converted the fleeting image into one of his most nuanced tableaux.
ProvenanceThe artist; private collection, U.S.A.; [Thaddaeus Ropac, London]; purchased by the MFAH, 2021
Exhibition HistoryRon Mueck: Twenty-Five Years of Sculpture 1996–2021. London: Thaddaeus Ropac, October 12–November 13, 2021
Edition 1/4 of this sculpture was exhibited at the following:
New Works by Ron Mueck. Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, February 16–May 6, 2018
Ron Mueck. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, February 26–August 13, 2017
Ron Mueck. São Paulo: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, November 20, 2014–February 22, 2015
Edition 3/4 of this sculpture was exhibited at the following:
Ron Mueck. Dom Museum, Vienna, Family Matters, 4 October, 2019–August 30, 2020
Highlights: Fondation Cartier Collection. Seoul: Seoul Museum of Art, May 30–August 15, 2017
Ron Mueck. Tampere, Finland: Sara Hildén Art Museum, June 2–October 16, 2016
Ron Mueck. Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, April 16–October 27, 2013
Ron Mueck Buenos Aires: Fundación PROA, November 16, 2013–February 23, 2014
Ron Mueck. Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna, March 20–June 1, 2014
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
Cataloguing data may change with further research.
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