TURNER GALLERIES... 2016 EXHIBITIONS

Working across a variety of media including sculpture, printmaking and video, Robert Hague brings an impeccable skill set to a contemporary sensibility. Robert is our first Artist in residence for the year.

Throughout his work, Hague 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. He works across numerous media, and from the very large to the delicate.

In Hague's most recent body of prints, he takes on a succession of iconic Australian artworks referencing colonial to modern imagery. Each is reconfigured, transported into a contemporary reading and rendered in exquisite detail using an old world stone lithographic process. These images of broken decorative porcelain plates, sometimes repaired using kintsugi (a gold highlighting of the trauma), depict cultural time-travellers (Ned Kelly shooting Captain Cook), modernist sculptures (Ron Roberson-Swann's Vault) and displaced gold miners (Down on his luck), each re-contextualised into an often biting critique on contemporary society.

Hague writes of Cook's Landing, "Ned Kelly's helmeted figure replaces the Aboriginal warriors in this reworking of an iconic 19th century etching. Captain Cook's boat-people arriving at Kernel in 1770 are met with resistance by the divisive bushranger from the 1880's. Kelly, who is often associated with xenophobia, is caught repelling the English arrival, in what amounts to a diabolical contradiction. These two powerful figures of Australian colonial history are forever in conflict over the rich prize of terra nullius (nobody's land)."

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. Also on display will be his video work Crush, and his impressive 3m bronze Ionic.

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. Recent exhibitions include CRUSH, Fehily Contemporary, The Wynne Prize (AGNSW), Erasure, The Art Vault (Mildura) and Inaugural, Nicholas Projects (Melbourne). Recent awards include the 2016 Blake Residency and Exhibition Prize, the 2011 Lorne Indoor Sculpture Award, and the 2010 Deakin University Small Sculpture Award.

"Working in the traditional materials of high sculpture - bronze, marble, stainless steel - Hague's works are at once instantly recognisable as art which harbour mysteries that deepen the longer one considers them." Dr. Andrew Frost (excerpt from Crush catalogue essay). Dr. Andrew Frost is a researcher in science fiction, cinema and contemporary art, the art critic for The Guardian and a lecturer in the Department of Media, Music, Communications and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author and presenter of more than a dozen documentaries on Australian contemporary art for ABC1.

*All prices are for framed artworks except where noted

crush edition 3/5 archive digital print 73.5 x 110cm 2015 $2,200 unframed
natives on the river [after glover] edition A/P hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper 76 x 100cm 2016 $2,200 sold t/p	blue claude [after mccubbin] edition 6/10 hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper, 24ct gold leaf 70 x 70cm 2015 $2,500 sold 6/10
the golden fleece [after namatjira] edition A/P hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper 70 x 70cm 2015 $1,800 sold a/p, 1/10, 2/10, 3/10	cook's landing [after macleod] edition A/P hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper 70 x 70cm 2015 $1,800 sold a/p, a/p 2, 1/10, 2/10
mine - yours [after dance] edition A/P hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper 70 x 70cm 2016 $1,800 sold a/p, t/p, 1/10, 2/10, 3/10	crush edition 3/5 high definition video 6 minutes 2015 $2,200
ionis bronze, stainless steel 300 x 280 x 90cm 2015 $38,000 sold
trojan hammer [moth] edition 7/10 hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper 30 x 46cm 2012 $1,100	trojan hammer [balloon] edition A/P hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper 55 x 42cm 2013 $1,100
trojan hammer [cloth] edition 3/10 hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper 38 x 56cm 2012 $1,100	trojan hammer [urn] edition 6/10 hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper 65 x 65cm 2013 $1,500
trojan hammer [osprey] edition A/P hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper 60 x 40cm 2013 $1,100	trojan hammer [bernini] hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper 96 x 66cm 2013 $1,800
trojan hammer [bernini tri colour] hand printed lithogrqaph on cotton rag paper 96 x 66cm [x3] 2013 $6,000 set of 3