Robert Montgomery (artist)

Robert Montgomery was born in 1972 in the village of Chapelhall, Scotland, to David and Janette Montgomery.

Alongside his parents, Montgomery credits his high-school art teacher John McKerrell, who taught him art and art history. In an interview he said that "John McKerrell was a proper Dead Poets Society inspiring, amazing teacher who is kind of a genius...he taught me about art from top to bottom. He comes to my parents' house for Christmas dinner. He's still my best mate in Prestwick."[3]

Another inspirational teacher was Mr Enoch Currie, who introduced him to celebrated poets such as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Montgomery recalls reading Philip Larkin's High Windows "when I was in third year and I still think a lot about the way Larkin writes when I write my billboards and text pieces."[3]

Aged 16, Montgomery was accepted to study fine art at the Edinburgh College of Art. McKerrell later helped him to get through his first year exams at Edinburgh.

Montgomery left with a first undergraduate degree in painting and later obtained a Master of Fine Arts. While still a student he and John Ayscough applied for a grant from the Scottish Arts Council for their project, Aerial '94. They were awarded £40,000, but the grant was not intended for students, and was nearly withdrawn. Andrew Nairne (then Visual Director at the Scottish Arts Council) supported the aspiring artists, as a result the project went forward with the help of the grant.[3]

From 1995 to 1997, Montgomery was the Core Program Artist in Residence at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston Texas.[4]

In his early career, Montgomery experimented with creating minimalist sculptures with elaborate poetic titles. Eventually, Montgomery dropped the sculptures all together and began to focus on the combination of verbal and visual presentation.[5] In his initial works, Montgomery wrote poems on the sides of buses and on walls with spray paint, wanting to follow closely in the footsteps of graffiti artists who made the city a "free space of diverse voices."[6]

In 1999, Montgomery moved to London in 1999, where he worded for the magazine Dazed & Confused.[3]

Often installed unauthorised amid industrial and urban sites, Montgomery's installations address universal themes such as power, love, and human kindness with sparse language and dramatic visuals.[7] These text-based conceptual pieces categorised as recycled sunlight pieces, billboard pieces, fire poems, woodcut panels, and watercolors.[8] Montgomery's cryptic and emotionally resonant poetry comments on contemporary life and affirms his personal and philosophical beliefs, which he describes as "melancholic post-Situationist", a 20th-century antiauthoritarian Marxist movement.[7]

Montgomery's famous black and white poems pasted on London billboards has, occasionally, provoked run-ins with the police. He was once put into the back of a police van after he pasted his poem for William Blake on a billboard in Bethnal Green. Montgomery recalled; "But I got into a conversation about literature and one of the police officers really engaged with it. I guess it was a lucky experience. I think most people wouldn't be averse to having a poem at the end of street instead of another Diet Coke ad."[9]

One of his most famous and personal light pieces, People You Love, was written as a result of the sudden death of a close friend from art school called Sean Watson who died as a result of being hit by a car on the Edgware Road in 2004. This was the first real experience of grief Montgomery had felt in his adult life, hitting him badly. One night he had a dream that Watson was there and alive, when he woke up the following morning he says that he woke up happier than he'd gone to bed, which led him to thinking that "maybe this is what ghosts are, maybe ghosts are a positive thing."

THE PEOPLE YOU LOVE BECOME GHOSTS INSIDE OF YOU AND LIKE THIS YOU KEEP THEM ALIVE

Montgomery showed at the 2011 Venice Biennale and was selected to represent the UK at the first biennale in India - The Kochi-Muziris Biennale – in December 2012. He has also had solo exhibitions at venues in Europe and in Asia, including major outdoor light installations on the site of the old US Air Force base at Tempelhof. The first monograph of his work was published by Distanz, Berlin in 2015.

Montgomery's work has been featured in a variety of galleries, publications, and public locations. His work is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston Texas[11] and the Anna Jill Lupertz Gallery in Berlin.

[11]

Montgomery lives in London.[12]. He prefers to spend his time in cities, transferring between London, Paris, New York, and Berlin.[10]

After being in a long-term relationship with frequent collaborator and fellow poet Greta Bellamacina, the two married in July 2017. To celebrate, Montgomery created a wedding fire poem which read, "SALVAGE PARADISE. LOVE IS THE WEATHER. DAYDREAMS FOREVER" before being set alight. Likewise, Bellamacina wrote him a fire poem reading "ETERNAL WINDOW HYMNS". The two met when Bellamacina was editing a book of love poetry and put one of Montgomery's poems in the book. She later said that "it was refreshing to meet someone through their words, you can find out a lot about the person." In 2015, Bellamacina gave birth to their first child, a son, Lorca.[13] In 2019, she gave birth to their second child, Lucian Valentine Swan.[14]

• Situationist International
• Visual poetry
• Martin Firrell

• Official website