Luke Roberts: ART HISTORICAL REFERENCES
Performing the Canon
Archival pigment prints (suite)

Luke Roberts (b. 1952) Alpha, Queensland, occupies a singular position in Australian contemporary art, where performance, photography, and art history converge in a sustained and incisive critique of cultural authority. This limited-edition suite of photographic works brings together a series of meticulously staged tableaux in which Roberts re-enters, inhabits, and destabilises canonical images drawn from Western art history and Australian painting alike.

Across the set, Roberts engages in acts of visual quotation that extend beyond homage. Referencing artists such as Caravaggio, Francisco Goya, and Diego Velázquez, alongside Australian figures including Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, Roberts does not simply restage iconic compositions; he performs within them. Through costume, gesture, and persona, he inserts his own body into the symbolic and historical frameworks that have long defined artistic value and meaning.

Central to this project is Roberts’ understanding of identity as constructed, fluid, and inherently theatrical. His well known alter ego, Pope Alice, informs a broader practice in which authorship is destabilised and reimagined. In these works, the artist becomes both subject and agent, collapsing distinctions between original and copy, sacred and profane, male and female, historical and contemporary. The photographic image operates not as documentation alone, but as a site of transformation.

Roberts grew up in Outback Queensland in what some might refer to as Cowboy Country. Hollywood Movies and associated American culture formed part of his visual archive. A response to these influences appears in references to the work of Andrew Wyeth and Grant Wood and elsewhere in this series.

The suite also foregrounds collaboration and contemporaneity. Works involving artists such as Richard Bell and Elisa Jane Carmichael extend Roberts’ engagement with art history into a distinctly Australian and politically charged context. Here, the canon is not only revisited but contested, opening space for multiple voices and perspectives to inhabit and reframe inherited narratives.

Importantly, these images operate within a lineage of appropriation that is both international and local, yet Roberts’ approach remains uniquely performative. Where appropriation often relies on citation, Roberts insists on embodiment. The result is a body of work that is at once intellectually rigorous and visually compelling, rich in historical reference while sharply attuned to questions of power, identity, and representation.

As a collection, this box set constitutes a coherent and significant articulation of Roberts’ practice. It offers not only a survey of key works, but a sustained meditation on the role of the artist within—and against—the structures of art history itself. In re-performing the canon, Luke Roberts does not seek entry into its traditions so much as he exposes and reconfigures them, leaving open the possibility of a more expansive and inclusive field of cultural meaning.

Produced as a cohesive, museum quality edition, this limited edition box set offers collectors a rare opportunity to acquire a concentrated expression of Roberts’ practice, with strong institutional relevance and clear alignment with major public collections including Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, National Gallery of Australia, Renia Sofia, Madrid, National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.