EMPIRE draws into focus sovereignty, and brings together key works in porcelain, lithography, sculpture, and installation. With everything from highly detailed drawing to riot-bricks, and the collected mass of 25,000 jellybeans, Robert Hague mixes humour with the grandeur of antiquity, and an often-biting commentary on the modern world.

Following on from the Melbourne Now 2023, NGV commission, EMPIRE includes two new folding-fan prints: Victoria and 2018. Glorious and yet grotesque, two prominent statues suffer a sudden gorilla recontextualisation. A single NGV Venus is also included.

Slip-cast bricks, posing as vases replete with dried flowers, beg to riot. Enormous decorative plates in porcelain and gold, such as Cooks’ Landing and King & Queen, hang with a Mine Yours which gently repeats in Warhol colours.

Hague says that “within the deceit of pattern and decoration, there lies a darker truth” and in 99%, a coma-inducing bowl of blood-red jellybeans, he aligns the deceit of decoration with that opiate of the masses, sugar, and the passive crowd - the powerless 99%.

‘Mine - Yours (after Dance)’

Captain James Cook sits fiercely stabbing at a world map (Nathaniel Dance 1775). His look is commanding yet the otherworldly landscape suggests that he is anything but at home. He is an alien in a foreign and fearful place. An 18th-century icon cast adrift, foolishly dividing up the spoils.

​Robert Hague’s imagery plays on the (im)permanence of historical objects, the ambiguities of their meanings, and the cultural associations of their forms. His prints, sculpture and video are immediately attractive but harbour contradicting layers that deepen the longer one considers them. A few works within this Plate series are in the NGA collection.

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