Visitors to the Venice Biennale in 2001 were highly impressed by the sculpture Boy-standing five meters tall-by London-based artist Ron Mueck, who was born in Melbourne in 1958. Harald Szeemann called the sculpture "the sphinx of the exhibition," and it soon became its landmark. The monumental, crouching figure of a youth makes a vulnerable, defensive impression, and yet its watchful eye seems to miss nothing. Mueck's human figures are always technically perfect, absolutely realistic, deliberately undersized or oversized. He first models them in clay and then takes a hollow cast which he fills with silicone or fiberglass. The finished models have delicate networks of veins and fine hairs, even seeming to breathe. Their perfection is always in the service of the transmission of contents, however: viewers are touched and set thinking by the emotional quality of figures like Pregnant Woman or Dead Dad-created by the artist after the death of his father. Mueck's sculptures have a great presence: of human features and yet artificial, they refer to fundamental questions, allowing a wealth of associations. Exhibition Schedule: Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum der Gegenwart, Berlin September 9 - November 2, 2003