An international touring exhibition associated with the Hercules Project, was based on the work of contemporary New Zealand artist Marian Maguire. Her series of prints The Labours of Herakles (12 lithographs and 8 etchings) superimposes an ancient Greek image of Herakles onto nineteenth-century New Zealand landscapes, wittily casting the hero as a European colonist. The work was discussed on the last day of the 2013 Hercules: a Hero for all Ages conference, with a presentation by the artist herself. The tour visited a variety of venues in the UK and continental Europe. The composition of the exhibition varied from place to place, as each venue displayed the prints alongside items from its own collections.
The exhibition has been presented in Leeds City Museum (23 January-15 March 2015), Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology (17 April-15 August 2015), Munich’s Antikensammlungen (16 September-13 December 2015), Würzburg’s Martin von Wagner Museum (22 January-22 May 2016) and Belgium’s Musée Royal de Mariemont (24 September-20 November 2016).
Following the exhibition, the Royal Museums Greenwich purchased a set of this series of prints, an account of the purchase and the exhibition status of the prints appears here.