Model planes

I finally made it over to Manchester Art Gallery on Friday for a shufty at the Ron Mueck exhibition. When I say exhibition, that's slightly overegging it: the show amounts to a total of three pieces. To be fair, the website does state this and it is part of The Art Fund's Artist Rooms, which I suppose also suggests something on a smallish scale.

Actually, size matters here. Two of the three sculptures are outsized; one is much smaller than anticipated. The unexpectedly small one, Spooning Couple, is the most detailed and perhaps the most intriguing, showing the vulnerability of relationships. What I found most interesting were the various ways in which the piece could be interpreted, depending on the position from which you looked at it. If your aspect was at the head of the bed, the faces (and, more significantly, the eyes) of the "characters" are unseen and the work seems to be an intimate portrait of the pair. If you stand at the foot of the bed, however, the snapshot is all together different and the distance between the man and woman is striking.

Another thing that struck me was how much I felt I'd already read the information plaques accompanying each model. I soon realised that it was because a review I'd read prior to attending the exhibition consisted of the descriptions pretty much word for word; a kind of lazy plagiarism. Tut tut.