Do you remember the old saying about sculpture? It’s the thing you bump into when you’re looking at a painting. But when we chance upon a hyperreal sculpture, we might back into a painting, or someone else. We might even apologize to it before you realize that it’s is inanimate. This is part of the point. These are figures where we are brought to the limit, the horizon, of identifying life and non-life. There’s no doubting that they are extraordinary feats of technique and engineering. Even the hairs have to be placed into the resin surface piece by piece.

Once you have adjusted your eyes and your presence to a hyperreal sculpture, the question you can’t help asking yourself is: ‘how is this any different from a film prop, except placed in a museum?” (The technical term is ‘fx’ as in ‘film fx’.) This is more than a valid question that the sculptors must ask themselves because the techniques they use are straight out of film fx developed out of the eighteenth century's lifelike waxworks.

It seems that the way that most if not all of the hyperrealist artists combat this problem is to appeal to our humanity. To make works that are so lifelike, they make us reflect on our humanity, both psychologically and physically: that we’re just vulnerable flesh prone to decay and dye. It’s a hard pill, but we do need to be reminded of the unwelcome facts from time to time.

The Birth of Hyperrealist Sculpture

Hyperrealism in sculpture occurred at about the same time as photorealistic painting, in the 1960s. It enjoyed a revival in the 1990s spurred along by advances in film effects. The term hyperrealism instead of realism addresses an issue that all of the principal exponents of this genre have in common. Namely, they use the spectator’s habitual reaction to literal reality to shock or disorient. The works play a double game of identification and estrangement. The attention to detail only heightens this friction. With digital and digitally assisted technologies, the effects can reach startling proportions.

How these works of artists working in this field—here the focus is on Sam Jinks, Ron Mueck, Patricia Piccinini and Paul Trefry (all born in Australia if that has anything to do with anything)—differ from the traditional waxwork or related figures such as those by George Stuart is that historical anecdote is either suspended or it is manipulated for the sake of making new associations.

If you want to know more about George Stuart, maker of smaller-than-life figures from history and mythology visit his virtual museum:

I’ve spent hours looking through this site, and it is a feast for any child and anyone with a hunger for history and the imagination.

Madame Tussaud. Two heads on spikes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Via thebigissue — Madame Tussaud. Two heads on spikes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Via TheBigIssue

When we stare at the two heads on spikes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in Madame Tussauds, or the motley gang of murderers in the Chamber of Horrors, we are also in the harness of historical fact, and anecdote, driven by facts and the fictions spun from them.

We are also in thrall with the pluck and audacity of Tussaud herself, not to mention her very strong stomach. While both the conventional waxwork and the hyperrealist sculpture share the same capacity for drama and wonder, the works of the leading artistic exponents are of anonymous types, and visual literalness plays a central part in the way in which other components such as size or deformity are introduced with fascinatingly jarring effects.

In tracing a rough genealogy of such work, the principal figure from the 1960s is Duane Hanson used fibreglass and vinyl to compose scenic tableaux or single figures. The figures in groups are usually shocking as the titles suggest: Riot (1967) and Vietnam Scene (1969).

Old Couple on a Bench, 1994. Duane Hanson. Via Artsy

His single figures are similarly motivated by social commentary, being of indigents or the plainest kinds of people, that is, the least likely to make into the waxwork sideshow hall of fame. As a prosaic poet, Hanson made great strategic use of matching authenticity with the inanimate artificial. For the viewer can gaze indefinitely at these figures without fear of feeling rude or intrusive, or of the figure faltering and moving.

Hanson presents the mundane (such as The Surfer, 1987) with a poised dispassion that is all the stronger for how it goads the viewer into a realm of speculation. Curators typically place Hanson’s single figures around corners and in places where viewers may chance on them without warning.

Hyperrealism, Global Culture and Mass Imaging

The surprise operating in the more recent generation of artists has deeper social causes and implications. The work of an artist like Mueck is attributable to the global culture of hyperrealism, not only in the form of mass imaging but also in how personality and celebrity have infected everyday life.

In effect, contemporary life enlists humans to a comparison with an endless stream of examples in the form of celebrity and style that encourages one always to be clothed and comported in a certain way. Fashion and popular culture are the drivers of the identity that one assumes and who one should emulate.

I recommend a short video of one of Mueck’s ‘making-of’ sequences:

Contrastingly, Mueck’s figures are presented in multivalent nudity, that is, not just naked (although not exclusively), but in states of vulnerability, be it death, illness, or pregnancy. When they are clothed, it is humbly, unspectacularly.

Ron Mueck

The vulnerability of Mueck’s figures differs from that of the work of Hans Bellmer in that it does not aspire to the same kind of dark, guilty, angry, and melancholy but instead reaches to the fundaments of humanness: sentient flesh requiring love and affirmation that is nonetheless alone, and which grows old and dies. Bellmer’s purgatory is inflicted and comes with its own compulsion, whereas Mueck’s purgatory is the very substance of life.

Ron Mueck began his career as the creative director of a children’s television show aired out of Melbourne, Australia where he also made, operated and did the voices of several puppets. Subsequently, Mueck was a puppet maker for Bill Henson.

He entered into art by chance, invited by his mother-in-law Paula Rego to fabricate a set of small figures for a tableau as part of an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. With the patronage of Charles Saatchi, Mueck formed complement of the ‘yBas’ (‘young British artists) in exhibiting in the enormously popular Sensation exhibition with Dead Dad (1996-7), a highly reduced facsimile of his father lying naked on a white plinth, in which the artist used his own hair.

As Kelly Grovier notes, its size renders it ‘disturbingly between mannequin and diminutive toy, its awkward stature somehow heightening, as it were, the discomforting effect’. Mueck had a troubled relationship with his father.

Dead Dad. 1996-7. Ron Mueck. Getty Images, Raoul Wegat

A common strategy is making his figures either inhumanly small or impossibly large. On rare occasions, he will resort to the supernatural, as in the early work of a little, glumly contemplative naked man on a life-size stool with outstretched wings (1997), or gruesome hairless dog with the face of a bald elderly man.

These are exceptions, for by and large Mueck’s people are unremarkable in their body shape or the facial appearance. The effectiveness of the size difference locates a critical trait in the human relation to the artificial body.

For unlike waxwork, which enlists the material reinvocation of lifelike appearance, together with clothes and maybe props for the sake of creating an imaginative space that pretends to bring history back to life, the undersize figure, the doll or the figurine has less of a spell to cast and exists for the sake of what we bring to it.

With the exception perhaps of his mildly menacing, frowning face (Mask (Self Portrait), 1997), Mueck’s oversize figures are indeed exclusively psychologically, as it were, undersized: the self-portrait which is a hollowed-out shell of a face, on its side, with eyes closed (Mask II, 2001-2); Big Baby II and Big Baby III (1997); or a naked pregnant woman some 2.5 metres tall with her arms raised (Pregnant Woman, 2002).

Pregnant Woman. 2002. Ron Mueck. Via Pinterest

Two sculptures are popular centrepieces for the collection that house them. One is Boy (1999), a crouching boy wearing only a pair of shorts, 5 metres high, peeping over his shoulder as if cowering or startled (ARoS art museum, Aarhus, Denmark). Another is a massive bald, thick-set man crouched in a corner (Untitled (Big Man), 2000, Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, USA).

Untitled (Big Man). 2000. Ron Mueck. Via Artsy

If his face is menacing, it is also disturbed as if sad or afraid, similar in vein to the tightly apprehensive bearded, 9’ man on a stool (Wild Man, 2005), whose aggression is entirely defensive. The smaller works have the same disarming, empathetic stillness, such as a couple sleeping in a spooning configuration (Spooning Couple, 2005), or a recent work Youth (2009) (figure 33), a negro boy of only 65 cm high holding up a T-shirt to inspect a gash under his ribs. The poet Craig Raine emphasizes the understated nature of Mueck’s work, its lack of sentimentality and that ‘the emotion is as accurate as of the physical detail’.

Spooning Couple. 2005-2007. Ron Mueck. Via Artsy

Sam Jinks

If it still has qualities of Mueck’s harsh physical pragmatism, Sam Jinks' work moves subtly in the direction of the macabre. His work does step into the outlandish such as the prone thin naked man with the head of a dog (Doghead, 2008), but like Mueck, these are extremes that express more explicitly the malleability, mutability and mortality of all flesh—and yet it takes simulated flesh with none of these qualities to convey this.

Hanging Man (2007) is an undersized, emaciated middle-aged man with short, evenly cut hair, face ruddy and downcast, suspended from under his shoulders by two rods of metal dowel affixed to the wall.

Hanging Man. 2007. Sam Jinks. Via samjinks.com

Rather than slumped, the fingertips of both hands press against the wall, arching his body slightly, suggesting some undisclosed intent. Musing of this work, the art critic Robert Nelson remarks that

The scary thing … is not what might be happening to the pictures—though this is sinister—but rather the comprehensive level of detail. The verisimilitude in the treatment removes you from the comfort of analogous images in the history of art. In the tradition of figurative sculpture, the agonized figure—from Ghiberti to Kollwitz—is bathed in aesthetic heroism.

Nelson concludes that it is ‘a figure that oscillates between being aft and being man; a stripped-down sign of a tortured spiritual history’. But it is also worth adding that this history is inscribed in the inevitability of suffering that occurs with biological degradation.

Still Life (Pieta). 2007. Sam Jinks. Via samjinks.com

Jinks’ Still Life (Pietà), 2007, achieves this with singular intensity. Lifesize, a somberly and conservatively dressed man of middle age with downcast eyes holds the dead body of a very old man, held up slightly and resting on the younger man’s knees, covered by grey drapery. Immediately evocative of Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498-1499) and numerous other works in this iconographic convention, the artist captures the same profound sorrow, yet the figures are deprived of anything heroic.

Michelangelo’s Pietà. 1498-1499. Via Britannica — Michelangelo’s *Pietà*. 1498-1499. Via Britannica

The old man lies limp and shows every sign of the helplessness and depletion that old age delivers. Such deaths, if they are slow, are usually met with as much relief as sorrow. The son holding his father evinces the blankness that comes from mental exhaustion and facing the ineffable. This work finds its complement in Woman and Child, 2010 where an aged woman, in a white slip, holds a newly born child, nestling patiently on her chest.

Check out this short clip.

Woman and Child. 2010. Sam Jinks. Via samjinks.com

Her chin gently touches the crown of the infant’s head, and the eyes are closed in a state of devotion, of love and also in contemplation of the life’s inexorable evanescence. And as if elaborating on this mute dialogue with death, Jinks subsequently produced Untitled (Standing Pieta), 2014, evoking the tense poses in the work of the Mannerist painter Jacopo Pontormo (I’m thinking, say of his Deposition, 1525-28) in which a white-haired man holds a younger man by the shoulders, the poses beautifully jarring.

Untitled (Standing Pieta). 2014. Sam Jinks. Via Artsy

The Deposition. 1525-1528. Jacopo da Pontormo. Via Artsy

Patricia Piccinini

Children and parenting are also a repeated theme in Patricia Piccinini's work, who also explores the horizon line of human frailty and compassion, but with figures that are fictional, or that have animal traits, and sometimes bordering on the gruesome.

Yet with Piccinini, gruesomeness is always constrained and displaced. For example, in a work that also alludes to an historical work of art, Doubting Thomas (2008), a sweet-looking boy of five or so, dressed in casual clothing, leans forward to touch the moist cavity of an appalling amorphous lump of a creature with no discernible appendages that sits (or rests) on a chair.

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. 1601-1603. Caravaggio. Via Caravaggio.org

The work is a pastiche of the scene recreated in several Renaissance and Baroque paintings of the episode when the apostle Thomas sought assurance of Christ’s resurrection by touching his wounds. Specifically, Piccinini’s work is inspired after the most famous of these, Caravaggio’s Incredulity of St Thomas (1601-1603), in which Christ invites the apostle to dig his finger into the wound on his torso.

In Piccinini’s words, Caravaggio’s work has a ‘really unselfconscious corporeality. No, metaphors here’. The tension that she recreates is through the interplay between the boy's innocence and the unfathomable ugliness of the thing, with its pink, mucousy orifice, wrinkled skin, skin spots and hair, and a large tuft of which is gathered on its ‘back’. The reference to Christ and his apostle immediately downplays the revulsion and undermines the fear of injury.

The Welcome Guest. 2011. Patricia Piccinini. Via Ocula

In an extraordinary work from a few years later, Welcome Guest (2011) a small girl in a grey marle top, blue patterned dress and pink tights stands on an antique bed on whose bedhead is perched a peacock. He is staring at the most startling aspect of the work, which is an indescribable creature with large tapering blunt tusks for hands and feet, poised precariously on the bedclothes his claws closed on the girl’s shoulders in some kind of embrace, with the girl, her hands forward appearing to approve of the welcome.

The creature’s torso, which is a conventionally athletic youth, leads to a head of a simian or Down syndrome shape with a low-slumped forehead and widely spaced eyes. Yet the look he gives the girl is vaguely intelligent and attentive—and benign. It is a benevolence at loggerheads with the first visual cues: from the peacock, conventionally a bird of ill omen (over-weaning vanity) to the miserable homunculus, everything of which spells violence.

The fact that the girl is the artist’s daughter, only adds to the compelling nature of the work, for aside from its imaginary force and the aesthetic charge generated from its deliberate visual contradictions, it can also be read a moral corrective.

For as children’s fairytales repeatedly demonstrate, the book should not be judged by its cover, and real virtue lies in the soul who penetrates to the other’s goodness to see past beauty and riches.

Posthumanism

Unlike Mueck and Jincks, Piccinini presents us with a distinctly posthuman universe. ‘Piccinini’s clones’ notes Kim Toffaletti, ‘are emblematic of our current cultural condition where the human, identity, and body's status are no longer fixed’.

This interest was already present at the beginning of her career in the early 1990s as an artist in which she fabricated what she called a ‘Lump’ from pig’s skin (which explains the kind of skin that her creatures frequently have, including the one Doubting Thomas), an amorphous thing accompanied by a primitive website in which the user could customize his or her lumps from a small number of options.

Piccinini’s has devoted her career, which also encompasses painting, video and photography, to examining the many worlds of biological manipulation. Hers is a world where, in the marriage of technology and imagination, almost everything is possible. Everything is credible, and therefore to be taken seriously—if only still, at the moment in the real world, hypothetically.

Writing on the work of Ron Mueck, Robert Rosenblum asserts that it belongs ‘to a growing progeny of synthetic human beings spawned by artists who seem to be responding to a contemporary world in which perfect replications—whether electronic or biological, a computer print-out or a cloned lamb—are saturating our experience and blurring distinctions between originals and copies’. But this observation only applies to a certain point because Mueck’s replicants are static and have a particular sensibility.

On the other hand, Piccinini’s work is about a world in which clones and new creations live seamlessly (and harmoniously is seems for the most part) in human society. The very concept of ‘human society’ has become an anachronism.

The Carrier. 2012. Patricia Piccinini. Via designboom.com

We might conclude that Piccinini is posthumanist, whereas Jinks and Mueck are humanist. For example, if we juxtapose Jinks’ Untitled (Kneeling Woman) (2015) with The Carrier (2012), the differences are plain to see.

Jinks’s work is a profoundly moving portrait of tender, again naked, supplication—mon cœur mise à nu, my heart laid bare. Kneeling with the torso prostrate upon them, the clasped hands make it hard not to see this in terms of a numinous experience which we then share. Piccinini’s ‘carrier’ is out of science fiction and Dr Seuss: a muscular humanoid with a charmingly bald head and benign snout carries a slight old woman, the quintessential sweet grandmother in a floral dress. This newfangled creature is presumably doing his life duty, and in Seussian vein, his name is the same as his function.

Piccinini’s work can be said to be humane in that it retains qualities of moral responsibility the extensiveness of sentiment, but it also gestures to a reconsideration of normalcy. This is not to make any qualitative claim about the value of these two approaches, however, only to emphasize that with Mueck and Jinks, the work is irrepressibly human, poignantly so. At the same time, Piccinini distends to the idea to admit of a different definition.

In his thorough examination of the posthumanism, Stefan Herbrechter rightly observes how in science fiction the artificial or new animal intelligence undergoes as ‘humanization’ either at the hands of humans, or what the humans must experience themselves as a realization or rite of passage. Planet of the Apes (1968) for instance ‘never breaks out of its anthropocentrism, however, in first projecting human “evil” onto the animal other and in the end presupposing the need for atonement and humility within “the animal”’.

While to some extent this anthropocentrism can be seen to be active in the work of Piccinini, it is also true that her human-to-non-human relationships occur in a space after conflict, or where no conflict has ever occurred. In this respect she heavily Spinozist, Spinoza being one of the incipient posthumanist thinkers. Spinoza advised that animals that could cause harm like spiders or snakes were not inherently evil, but instead had ‘expressions’ that were inhospitable to our own particular ‘substance’.

Or as Deleuze puts in his study of Spinoza, ‘there is no Good or Evil [de Bien ni de Mal] in nature in general, but there are good and evil [du bon et du mauvais], useful and harmful for each existing modality. Evil and bad come from the point of view of one or another mode’. Being human, we judge what is bad from our point of view’. Goodness and also beauty are therefore highly contingent qualities.

Piccinini’s work urges us to consider that there are more than just a few more standards of measure than those of one’s own or one’s neighbour. The monstrous may not be monstrous after all; perhaps the monstrous lies in exaggerating, overemphasizing, hypertrophying the ‘human’ in both body and concept. Maybe it is humans that are the monsters.

Paul Trefry

A diminutive old man stares into the distance, his expression mildly quizzical, feeble and forlorn. His thin arms are folded behind his back. Under his small paunch, his trousers are rolled to under the knee. This is “Old Charlie”. What is he up to? Standing in the surf staring out to the horizon? He would elicit our sympathy if her weren’t so lost in his inner world.

Old Charlie. 2010. Paul Trefry. Via Artist Profile

He is half-scale, which, once we have overcome our sense of physical superiority, transports him even further into an undisclosed elsewhere. Another work perhaps holds a clue: Gladis knew Charlie would be late. Sitting on a public bench with her hands are folded decorously on her lap, her bespectacled eyes stare vacantly into the void with quiet, stoic acceptance of the here and now.

Maybe Charlie is late because he is lost in his own private reverie. The silence of these figures is profound, and they are all the sadder because they do not openly elicit your sympathy.

In the world of hyperrealist sculpture, the big elephant in the room is always the question of how and to what extent they differ from film effects. With some artists working in this genre, the question comes more to the fore than others, usually ignored. The danger of hyperrealism is that it can quickly lapse into lurid fascination, cheap horror or quasi-pornographic voyeurism. (There should by now be a sort of checklist of dos and don’ts, just as artists should now stay clear of skulls.)

Paul Trefry, himself a maker-designer of ‘fx’, combats this problem by tackling themes and imagery that mainstream media would not, including the indignity and boredom of old age, and the taboo of the exploitable vulnerability of children. An earlier work at a public sculpture festival consisted of a toddler on a beach in diapers wearing an anxious expression as if he had lost his parents. The outcry was hysterical.

Spurred by his work's sensitivities over the years, Trefry embarked on a new set of child works. One is of a flayed skin on the floor with the head and arms intact, in the manner of the trophy rugs of bears and lions.

Not only is the eccentricity of this work disturbing in itself, but its flagrant violence seems to be a fillip against all those who mindlessly gatekeep the kinds of works of art that are shown.

More disturbing still is the explicitly titled Innocence Removed: it is a naked child of indiscernible gender with an expression on the verge tears, arms limp by its side, with a grenade covering the genitalia. There are markings over its body that announce “violence’, “trafficking”, “punched”, “burnt” and so on.

Innocence Removed (detail). 2020. Paul Trefry. Via Artist Profile

Formally speaking, this work's cleverness lies confronting the extreme literalness of hyperrealism not by disavowal but by facing it and amplifying it. As you might not expect, the net effect is still ambiguous, for one is left uncertain whether this figure refers to an actual person or is a cipher for the voiceless multitude of abused and mistreated children.

We cannot stop returning to the expression to which we can all relate to the pursed lips and tensed muscles as they prepare for an explosion of grief. Courageously, Trefry suggests that the other side of the betrayal of children lies in the prurient censorship of comment and representation regarding anything but a trite wish-image of what children should be, that we may stare at their nakedness without being called paedophiles.

Trefry sculpts the homeless, the aged, the under-aged and the bewildered. His work's common thread is fragility: youth or old age, or the caprice of fate. Key to his works is frankness without condescension or melodrama. In his work, we are faced suddenly and unerringly with something that we instinctually avoid.

In so doing, Trefry faces us with our own frailties. His work seeks to widen the ambit of our empathy. His work does not preach. Rather, it operates on a far more straightforward, human register. We will all feel the unforgiving encroachment of time, and there will always be those, even if not seen, who live in unspeakable conditions. Trefry gives the less-than-visible the dignity of an asserted presence.

Homeless Still Human. 2015. Paul Trefry. Via Artist Profile

What’s the Fuss about Hyperreal Sculpture?