Australian sculptor Ron Mueck has made just a few dozen sculptures in the last 20 years. His likenesses of humans range from newborns to octogenarians are often out of scale.

He spends more than a year conceiving and making each figure, capturing every feature with astonishing detail. Mueck rarely talks about his work but said in an interview in 2003,

“I never made life-size figures because it never seemed to be interesting. We meet life-size people every day. [Altering the scale] makes you take notice in a way that you wouldn’t do with something that’s just normal.”

The son of German émigrés, Mueck was born in Australia in 1958. After working in film and television in the United States and London, he shifted his focus to the fine arts in the mid-1990s. The sculptures assembled here —about a third of Mueck’s entire production— illustrate the arc of his career from 1999 to 2013.

Fresh from a world tour, 13 of Mueck’s sculptures will be on view at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts starting today through August. Here’s an unsettling preview.

(via W)