robert hague artwork

robert hague

Working across a variety of media including sculpture, printmaking and video, Robert Hague brings an impeccable skill set to a contemporary sensibility. His work revels in ambiguity, conveying simultaneously elements of the heavy and light, the fixed and fluid, the brutal and gentle, the abstract and figurative and the stern and amusing.

Hague works across numerous media, and from the very large to the delicate. In this most recent body of prints, he takes on a succession of iconic Australian artworks. Each reconfigured, transported into a contemporary reading and rendered in exquisite detail using an old world stone lithographic process. Drawn decorative porcelain plates, broken, sometimes repaired using kintsugi (a gold highlighting of the trauma), depict cultural time-travelers (Ned Kelly shoots Captain Cook), modernist sculptures (Vault/Yellow Peril) and displaced gold miners (Down on His Luck), each re-contextualised into an often biting critique on contemporary society.

His recent Trojan series, in which hammers are recast as bombers, balloons, birds and other unexpected objects, shows his deftness with material and subject matter - the hammer, a sculptor's tool, pushes forwarded into new territories, much like the artist himself.

From his studio in Melbourne, Robert Hague has exhibited widely and is represented in major public collections such as the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. In 2010 his work was the subject of a ten year retrospective at Deakin University (Burwood). Recent exhibitions include the 2016 Blake Prize (awarded the Blake Residency and Exhibition Prize), CRUSH, Fehily Contemporary (Melbourne), The Wynne Prize (AGNSW), Erasure, The Art Vault (Mildura) and Inaugural, Nicholas Projects (Melbourne).