Mueck’s hyperrealist sculptures have inspired
wonder for over a decade.
In Mask II he has
represented the features of his own face with unstinting accuracy
but on a superhuman scale. The resulting object – disorientating
and moving in equal measure – wavers between realism and
abstraction, monumentality and intimacy, and between the states of
life and death. Its neighbour is Hoa
Hakananai’a, an enormous stone statue from Rapa Nui (Easter
Island).
These two figures speak to each other across
several centuries and 8,500 miles in the long history of monumental
sculpture. Both reveal the enduring human need to make our own
image on a grand scale. Mask II’s
prostrate orientation also alludes to the many fallen moai (statues
of human figures) that remain on Rapa Nui today as reminders of a
civilisation that has since been transformed.