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'EMPIRE'

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%.