Ron Mueck: En Garde

14 Feb-2 Apr 2025

Overview

Ron Mueck’s En Garde (2023) will be exhibited for the first time in the UK at Thaddaeus Ropac, London. The work was conceived as a unique edition for his third solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, Paris (2023), and then exhibited at Triennale Milano and Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2023–24). Thaddaeus Ropac will present the single artist’s proof of this formidable work, which offers insight into the internationally acclaimed sculptor’s latest innovations. A colossal trio of black dogs, standing almost three metres tall with ears pricked and hackles raised, demonstrates Mueck’s shifting focus from meticulous surface detail to poise and tension; as he distils his vision to confront the viewer with the immediacy and essence of an encounter which, in typical Mueck style, leaves the audience free from prescribed narrative.

The title, En Garde, referring to the command that calls a fencer to adopt a defensive stance and prepare for attack, not only describes the dogs’ alert and menacing stances, but also serves as a warning to the viewer: a call to arms that invites them to consider their own participation in the sculpture’s choreography. From the moment of entering the room, the viewer themselves becomes a protagonist as the whole space is charged with tension.

The paring back of surface detail in favour of a concentration on form and the orchestration of postures allows the tangibility of that initial encounter to remain palpable as the viewer moves closer, and around, to explore the changing landscape of the dogs’ bodies and their forest of legs.

Over a career spanning three decades, Mueck is celebrated for exploring the physiological implications of scale. Whether miniaturised or enlarged, his use of scale heightens our awareness of the relative spaces our own bodies occupy, as he charts the full spectrum of human experience with striking perceptiveness. In En Garde, the huge scale of the dogs intensifies their threatening presence and emphasises our own vulnerability, while at the same time allowing us ultimately to approach far closer than would otherwise feel safe. After working on small maquettes to clarify pose and character, Mueck makes full-size drawings on his studio wall to establish scale before the final work is created.

Although packs of dogs have been a recurring interest for Mueck for many years, with clay and wax maquettes populating his studio, En Garde marks the first time this subject has been brought to fruition. Uncanny yet familiar, the work shows the artist’s unerring ability to identify and draw out the subtleties of the human condition. Choosing moments that may come from everyday life, but equally from folklore or fairytale – both rich in the imagery of personified beasts – Mueck imbues his dogs with a timeless sense of poignancy. His trinity of dogs, at once creatures from the streets and characters from an unknown mythology, are no different from their human compatriots in leading us to contemplate our own position in the wider world.

En Garde, with its sense of brooding uncertainty, suggests an undeniable awareness of the fragility of balance and harmony at a time when contentions of the present may irrevocably affect the shape of all our futures. But Mueck pauses us in the present, where that instant is drawn out for longer contemplation. As art historian Robert Rosenblum puts it, Mueck’s ‘sculptural vignettes are from scenarios that have no beginnings or ends but only uncertain middles’.