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%.

‘Cook’s Landing (after Macleod)’

Ned Kelly’s helmeted figure replaces the Aboriginal warriors in this reworking of this iconic 19th century etching.

Captain Cook’s boat-people arriving at Kurnell 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).

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