This Ron Mueck work (In Bed) is on loan from the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane. You really have to see it to believe it, right down to the indentations that her fingers make into her skin.

The one comment that had been left on PBase (by a former member who departed the site many years ago, like so many others...) was that "If it weren't for the deliberate placement of the figure in the background, I would think that this is your wife or lover!"

At the time, I thought "Yeah, I wish." OK, maybe not if she was that actual size, that would probably be a problem, but Mueck is exceptionally good at making his figures not merely realistic and believable, but sympathetic. Seen from other angles, she doesn't have classic, model-like beauty. Her nose is quite pointed and bulbous at the end, her hair is flat, her lips are thin, and her chin line recedes a little. That, of course, is the point. She's not an ideal, she's a representation of reality. But her lack of some absurd ideal of "perfection" makes her even more attractive in my view (which may have been distorted by the fact that I was still in the hellscape that is "the dating scene" at the time), and her face is kind. She seems down to earth and the sort of person that I would like to have met, had she been real.

But that said, what is Mueck conveying here? In a word, thought. According to a book that I bought from the NGV at the time of the exhibit, you can trace a line from this sculpture back to Rodin's The Thinker which portrays contemplation as an exaggerated physical act. And it's true that Mueck has done past models where the subject is lost in thought. Some, like Ghost from 1998 (which was not part of this exhibit) are clearly disturbed by their thoughts. That one features an adolescent girl standing with her back to a wall, head slightly bowed, eyes on an angle and unfocused, lips slightly pursed.

In In Bed, on the other hand, my theorised wife clearly has something on her mind. She is staring off into the distance, clearly engaged with her own thoughts and not the world around her. Placing her hand to her face suggests a sense of unease, but no more than that, I think. There is something that she needs to think about and figure out, but she's showing no real signs of being tense or upset. It's a situation that is relatable, because there would be few of us who have not been in the same position which again comes back to making her sympathetic and familiar.

There is another thing that I had not consciously noticed at the time, and which isn't obvious from this shot but in retrospect it makes a lot of sense. Her eye level is at 150cm, putting her roughly at eye level with a standing adult. Again, this helps with developing a sense of connection between the subject and her viewers.

I would rate this as if not my favourite Mueck, at least a seriously close second.