on this fine warm fall day, i went to hamburger bahnhof where there were two distinct exhibits on, the permanent one, and an exhibit of sculptures by a man going by the name of ron mueck. the permanent exhibition is not that large, but i love the place and i often come here.
i wasn't much in the mood for reading on this day, so i just studied the sculptures quite closely. there was a movie explaining how mueck creates his sculptures, but it had already started and the room was packed, and i didn't want to wait, so i have only pictures. i don't know what materials he uses. the large sleeping man looked to have been done with fiberglass, but the others looked more like wax. i might go back to catch the movie and learn more. most of the sculptures were physically quite small, perhaps half size. the boy with the mirror looked about the right size, perhaps a tad small. the sleeping head was perhaps 5 times life size, and the pregnant woman was perhaps double life size. as with the hanson exhibition i found it worrying to think of what one could do with life sized figures... some of them were utterly convincing until you looked extremely closely, something you would never do if you really believed they were real, and were not in some gallery. incidentally, ron mueck has been involved with film, and among other things did the special effects for labyrinth. here is a link to a bbc article on him. the lighting in those pictures is way too harsh and some of the realism is utterly lost.
