Confronted in Edinburgh by 10 of Ron Mueck’s sculptures, I ask myself what’s wrong with the waxworks at Madame Tussauds. They don’t convince either as portraits or sometimes even as human figures. In spite of their size — they’re either much larger or smaller than life — Mueck’s figures are, by contrast, uncannily, disturbingly real. Real human hair sprouts from nostrils, arms, chest and legs; eyes glisten; and the skin is flushed, mottled or apparently damp with sweat. It makes you wonder what the marionettes were like that he made for children’s television in his native Australia. Or his creations for Jim Henson, inventor of The Muppets. Or the models he produced for the advertising industry. All that work prepared him for a career as an independent sculptor that began only 10 years ago. His success was almost immediate. Charles Saatchi commissioned Dead Dad, later included in 1997’s Sensation. That made Mueck famous. How could it be otherwise, given the broad public’s preference for paintings and sculptures of things they can recognise? His works have been described as “the most flawlessly hyper-real figures in art history”. Yet they’re more than that. They’re uncanny and unnerving.

This show includes new work as well as old. One sculpture made specially is In Bed (2006). It shows an anxious woman propped up on a pillow and lost in thought. The photograph here doesn’t even hint at its power, because it gives no clear sense of scale. The woman and her bed are more than twice life-size; she’s the size, relative to you now, that your mother was when you were a child, standing at her bedside hoping for attention. You don’t get attention here. She looks right past you. The result is a feeling of desperation as powerful as anything that worried you when you were five.

It’s the strong feelings generated by Mueck’s sculptures that make them so powerful. But the sheer craftsmanship and skill involved are also breathtakingly impressive. In the last century, skill was thought irrelevant by most progressive artists. So was realism. Is Mueck a symptom of a profound change? Or is he, emotion and all, simply regressive?

Ron Mueck is at the Royal Scottish Academy until Oct 1