Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Old Woman in Bed
Ron Mueck Australian
Not on view
The diminutive figure of the Old Woman in Bed, huddled in the fetal position under a pile of folded blankets, connects the earliest and last vulnerable stages in the cycle of life. Mueck’s figures are hyperrealistically rendered but are nevertheless uncanny in their unexpected scale, giving them a surprising emotional and psychological charge—in this work heightening the sense of the figure’s fragility. Finally, the elderly woman’s isolation on the gallery plinth underscores the inevitable solitude in which sleep is experienced and life is departed.
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