McCubbin's failed gold prospector (Down on his Luck, 1889) sits mournfully in a Wedgwood paradise (after Claude Lorraine, 1650's), its broken porcelain traced with veins of gold (kintsugi).

Lorraine here depicts an idealised urban landscape, a pre-Romantic image of utopia and one senses that McCubbin’s miner has realised that his dream of creating Australia in this image is not only futile but was perhaps the wrong dream all along.

Blue Claude is a work about the squandering of Australia’s mining boom, both then and now and about how we choose to commemorate history within our domestic lives.

Robert Hague is an artist who brings an impeccable skill set to the contemporary scene. Throughout his work he revels in ambiguity, conveying simultaneously elements of the heavy and light, the fixed and fluid, the brutal and the tender. He works across numerous media including, printmaking, video, painting and installation but with a concentration on sculpture, in both metal and stone.

Robert Hague’s lithographic prints bring together the feel and grandeur of antiquity with an often-biting commentary on the modern world. By embracing classical techniques, he manages to make the bitter into the sweet and shows us that contemporary art can be timeless. His fan series employs the metaphor of the decorative folding-fan, a decorative object that speaks of the politics and culture of the collector, decoration as meaning, pattern as ownership and our desire for a cultural belonging.

From his studio in Melbourne, Hague prints his own work directly from limestone slabs, on a 1940’s Charles Brand lithography press. He has exhibited widely and is represented in major public collections such as the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2019 his work was the subject of a retrospective at the Casula Powerhouse (Sydney). Recent exhibitions include ‘Melbourne Now 2023’, NGV Australia, ‘New Prints’ at IPC New York, ‘Common Ground’ at NGV International, ‘The Megalo International Print Prize’ (Canberra), ‘Porcelaine’ at Turner Galleries (Perth), the Blake Prize (awarded the Blake Residency), 'CRUSH' at Fehily Contemporary, the ‘Wynne Prize’ at AGNSW and 'Inaugural' at Nicholas Projects.

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