A sleep-deprived mother whose arms are too full to hold her child, a teenage boy clenching his young lover's wrist, the awkwardness of adolescence: Australia's most internationally renowned artist magnifies human emotion.
Melbourne-born sculptor Ron Mueck is arguably best known for working alongside David Bowie in the 1986 film Labyrinth, where he puppeteered and voiced the horned beast Ludo.
But his hyper-realistic and often unsettling works have captured the art world.
"He is, I would say, the most renowned Australian artist on the international scene," Art Gallery of New South Wales director Maud Page told AAP.
"He is unique in presenting a very emotional situation that has both ambiguity, but also something that you can recognise."
Mueck has previously exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Danish contemporary art museum ARoS and other famed institutions.
After years working overseas, he has returned for his first Australian exhibition in more than a decade.
"What I'd love our audiences to take away is to be more perceptive of each other - of humans and their responses to things - and be more attentive to the little side glances, to the way that a hand holds another hand or body," Ms Page said.
The works on display at Sydney's Art Gallery of NSW show off Mueck's technical expertise.
Ribs ripple behind sheets of skin, wedding rings dig into the fingers of long-married and perhaps ambivalent couples, a clasped hand settles into the flesh of another.
Despite his success, Mueck remains a notoriously private artist.
Unlike other sculptors of his stature, he creates works on his own without the help of any assistants and rarely, if ever, appears in public.
But this sense of enigma and isolation helps audiences relate to his sculptures.
"Because of the way that Ron works - in that sort of isolation - he's connecting with people in what feels like quite a direct way," Ron Mueck studio director and spokesman Charlie Clark told AAP.
"It's okay to feel whatever you feel, there's no right way to look at a work of art and no right thing that you should be taking from it's a moment for you to be with the work and yourself.
"It doesn't feel like an exhibition of sculptures, it feels like a series of encounters."
Ron Mueck: Encounter will open to the public at the Art Gallery of NSW on Saturday.
