Image: Modern Two, Edinburgh
Ron Mueck’s monumental sculpture A Girl has returned to Edinburgh’s Modern One, where it is now on display as the centrepiece of an exhibition featuring more than 50 works. The giant, hyper-realistic depiction of a newborn baby measures over five metres in length and presents the infant’s first moments of seeing the world.
The work is back in the Scottish capital after travelling across Europe, including stops in Denmark, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Its return places one of Mueck’s best-known sculptures before Edinburgh audiences again, reinforcing the city’s role as a venue for major presentations of contemporary figurative art.
The exhibition around A Girl includes works by Flora Yukhnovich and Gwen Hardie, as well as early 20th-century Scottish artists. That mix of contemporary and historical material gives the display a wider frame than a single-object presentation, situating Mueck’s sculpture within a broader conversation about figuration, scale and the continuing appeal of the human image in art.
Mueck is known for sculptures that combine exacting realism with a destabilising sense of scale, and A Girl remains one of the most striking examples of that approach. Its return to Modern One underscores the continuing draw of large-scale sculpture as a public attraction and as a serious exhibition device, capable of anchoring an installation that connects different generations of artists.
For Edinburgh, the exhibition also adds momentum to the city’s contemporary art offering through a work that has already circulated widely in Europe. That international journey is significant in itself: it suggests the sculpture’s enduring relevance beyond a single museum context and highlights how major contemporary works can travel as cultural events in their own right.
With over 50 works in the show, the exhibition offers visitors more than a chance to see a celebrated Mueck sculpture again. It presents A Girl as part of a broader curatorial conversation, bringing contemporary artists and early Scottish modern figures into proximity and offering a reminder of how one standout work can structure the public life of an exhibition.
