LONDON, ENGLAND.- The Art Fund has helped the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to acquire Ron Mueck's iconic sculpture, A Girl. The enormous five metre figure was made especially for an exhibition of Mueck's work in Edinburgh in 2006. The sculpture was purchased for £400,000 with a £50,000 grant from The Art Fund.

A Girl is a huge sculpture of a newborn baby, made with painstaking attention to detail. As well as the technical brilliance of Mueck’s sculpture, which includes every tiny feature down to the baby’s wispy hair and hundreds of tiny folds and wrinkles in her skin, his sculpture conveys the naked baby’s vulnerability through her pose and facial expression.

A Girl caused a sensation at Mueck’s exhibition in Edinburgh in 2006. An unprecedented 130,000 people visited the show in just nine weeks, and of all the works in the exhibition it was reported to be the sculpture that people spent most time looking at.

Ron Mueck’s work became famous in 1997 when a poignant sculpture of his dead father’s small, naked body was exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition in London. Since then his astonishingly lifelike sculptures, often naked and always much larger or much smaller than real life, have caused a worldwide sensation.