16 Oct 2025
Encounter Ron Mueck’s vivid, intimate and monumental sculptures at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
This summer for the Sydney International Art Series 2025–26, the Art Gallery of New South Wales presents Ron Mueck: Encounter, the artist’s largest exhibition ever shown in Australia.
Celebrated internationally for his astonishingly lifelike sculptures, Ron Mueck (born 1958, Melbourne; lives England) has, since the late 1990s, redefined figurative sculpture with works that probe the limits of human experience. Be they intimate or gigantic, his figures reveal moments of birth and death, connection and isolation, drawing viewers into a heightened awareness of their own place in the world.
A Sydney-exclusive for summer, Ron Mueck: Encounter marks the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Australia in more than a decade. Featuring works gathered from across the globe, most never seen in Australia before, the exhibition draws the artist’s past sculptures into dialogue with new directions in his practice that speak with urgency to our troubling times.
Ron Mueck: Encounter is supported by the NSW Government through its tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW, and is presented as part of the Sydney International Art Series 2025–26.
Minister for Jobs and Tourism Steve Kamper said: ‘Ron Mueck’s work has captivated audiences around the world, and this new exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the Sydney International Art Series will give visitors the unique opportunity to experience his extraordinary sculptures.
‘Major cultural events like the Sydney International Art Series not only enrich our state’s vibrant arts and culture scene but also attract visitors from across the country and the globe, boosting our local economy and showcasing NSW as Australia’s leading destination for world-class experiences.’
Ron Mueck: Encounter will feature nearly one third of the artist’s total career output, including key works such as the devastatingly observant Woman with Shopping 2013, the haunting Dark Place 2018 and the crowd-pleasing and massively scaled Couple Under an Umbrella 2013. The exhibition will include loans from public and private collections in Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as from the artist’s own collection.
Art Gallery of New South Wales director Maud Page said: ‘Ron Mueck is one of Australia’s most exceptional living artists, and it is a privilege to welcome him back to Sydney after more than two decades. This exhibition has been many years in the making, and it offers audiences the rare chance to encounter his singular vision on home soil. Each of his sculptures carries an uncanny power to hold us still – asking us to reflect not only on the intimate details of life but on our shared humanity.’
Having begun his career in film and television, Mueck dedicated himself to contemporary art in the mid 1990s, drawing international attention and acclaim with Dead Dad 1996–97, a deeply personal sculpture of his own father made at half scale, exhibited as part of the landmark 1997 exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists at the Royal Academy, London. Over subsequent decades, he has explored the human condition through works that tackle moments both ordinary and profoundly poignant; his sculptures confound with their immaculately lifelike appearance yet astounding scale.
In more than three decades, Mueck has created fewer than 50 works. Beginning with drawings and maquettes, his process ranges from traditional clay modelling and casting to digital 3D modelling for larger sculptures, each meticulously hand-finished. His sculptures have been the focus of major solo exhibitions worldwide – including recent shows at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2025), Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands (2024) and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France (2023). His 2025 exhibition in Seoul, and his two 2014 exhibitions in Brazil at Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, each broke visitor attendance records. Mueck’s work is widely collected, and the artist remains a defining figure in contemporary figurative sculpture.
At the centre of the Art Gallery’s exhibition will be the unveiling of a bold new immersive sculpture, Havoc 2025, created especially for Sydney. A monumental and uneasy work of great intensity, Havoc invites viewers into an ominous space where two packs of monstrously large dogs are caught at the brink of a fight. At once enigmatic and viscerally menacing, this new work presents audiences with a profoundly unsettling yet exhilarating encounter.
Art Gallery of New South Wales senior curator of exhibitions Jackie Dunn said: ‘Ron Mueck has been exploring the richly symbolic subject of dogs for some years, and in Havoc they erupt with startling force. Towering in scale, with bared teeth and bristling hackles, these mythic yet very real creatures create a palpable tension that mirrors our anxieties about the current social climate.’
The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated publication that introduces new developments in, and ways of considering, Mueck’s practice in an extended essay by the exhibition’s curator, and documents the making of Havoc in Mueck’s Isle of Wight studio.
Ron Mueck: Encounter is exclusively on show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from6 December 2025 to 12 April 2026. Tickets are now on sale, including discounted 2-for-1 tickets on Wednesday evenings for Art After Hours and the Art Pass, which grants entry to both Ron Mueck: Encounter and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s Sydney International Art Series 2025–26 exhibition Data Dreams: Art and AI.
For more information and to book tickets, visit the Art Gallery website.
The Sydney International Art Series is a NSW Government initiative through its tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW, in collaboration with the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia to bring the world’s most outstanding international artists and their works exclusively to Sydney.
-ENDS-
About the Art Gallery of New South Wales On Gadigal Country
The Art Gallery of New South Wales acknowledges the traditional custodians of the Country on which it is located, the Gadigal, and recognises their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. From its magnificent site in Sydney, the Art Gallery is one of Australia’s pre-eminent art museums and the state’s leading visual arts institution. Its mission is to serve the widest possible audience as a centre of excellence for the collection, preservation, documentation, interpretation and display of Australian and international art, and a forum for scholarship, art education and the exchange of ideas. The transformation of the Art Gallery – now with two buildings, Naala Badu and Naala Nura – brings together art, architecture and landscape in spectacular new ways with galleries and seamless connections between indoor and outdoor spaces. Naala Badu is the most significant cultural development to open in Sydney in half a century and is a prominent new destination for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and culture.