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.