RON MUECK
The Mori Art Museum and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain: Ron Mueck from Wednesday, April 29, to Wednesday, September 23, 2026.
Organized in collaboration with the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, this exhibition arrives in Tokyo via Milan and Seoul. It is his first in Japan in 18 years, with many pieces making their Japanese debut.
2026 is the year of YBA in Tokyo. This important exhibition held at the Mori Museum opens as another major show currently at The National Art Center devoted the Young British Artists Movement, with which Ron Mueck is associated , is about to close (on May 11). Both shows provide a generational panorama of mediums and preoccupations in 90s UK, more tellingly it could be argued by artists such as Tracy Emin, Steve McQueen, or Gillian Wearing. In the case of Mueck, all institutions are keen to remind us that his output consists of about fifty works. The Mori has eleven of them, a significant selection that includes both allegorical themes and capturess of the quotidian. But still not large enough to occupy all of the museum’s galleries, two of which display a selection of photographs and two films created by French photographer Gautier Deblonde who has documented Mueck’s work for over twenty-five years, including Mass (2005-2017), made up of one hundred giant skulls, tightly packed, catacombs-like though ‘messier’, which aptly closes the show.
The shifts in scale, subjects, and formal materials have quickly placed him in the company of peers who had arrived before, notably Stephan Balkenhol and Charles Ray. Mueck, who emerged in 1996, saw his work received with a newer set of analytical criteria developed in publications ranging from I-D to Frieze. His sculptures were interpreted through a narrative framing in a post-Thatcher Britain; it embraced figuration and theatricality along with a muted, sombre palette of tones and mysteries. These sculptures are without movement, static with the weight of time, of where to go next. Yet it runs for five months in Roppongi.
Man in a Boat, 2002, Mixed media,159 x 138 x 425.5 cm, Private collection, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2025, Photo: Nam Kiyong , Photo courtesy: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, National, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
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