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Ron Mueck, Edited by David Hurlston

Christopher Hirst
Friday 14 October 2011 00:00 BST
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Propelled to fame by the RA's Sensation! exhibition in 1996, Ron Mueck differed from the Young British Artists who made up the rest of the show. For one thing he was Australian (though resident in London), for another his detailed sculpture of the human body revealed startling expertise and intense seriousness (his contribution was a prone figure "Dead Dad").

This survey of Mueck's oeuvre to 2009 reveals cautious expansion in scale and subject. Discussing a sunbathing figure on a lilo (2010), one contributor divines the message: "We are all profoundly adrift."

A work in which a black youth raises his T-shirt to examine a knife wound has a powerful resonance. But is Mueck a revelatory realist or just a brilliant technician?

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