Robert Montgomery
Scottish, b. 1972
Robert Montgomery is a Scottish-born, London-based contemporary artist and poet. He is renowned for his large-scale light works using words and poetry installed in public spaces. As well as his evocative light poems, which use environmentally friendly LED lights, he is well known for his billboard poems, fire poems, woodcuts, paintings and watercolours. Exploring how the constant flood of images in the modern world has alienated us from our authentic voice, his works explore political and ecological themes, with particular focus on the tension between the digital and natural world. The distinctly lyrical voice of his visual poetry invites us to reconnect with nature, offering a moment of pause and introspection.
Montgomery studied at Edinburgh College of Art, completing a BA and an MFA. Initially focusing on painting, he soon moved into text and installation works, with his practice developing during his time as the Artist-in-Residence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1995-97). He has been a visiting artist at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, University of Newcastle and Chelsea College of Art, London.
Montgomery began to make light works after the American artist James Turrell, pioneer of the Light and Space movement, visited his studio at the MFAH museum in Houston in the 1990s. He has also credited the works of Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner as influences; conceptual artists who also traverse the boundary between visual art and the written word. His interest in text-based art developed in the library of Edinburgh College of Art, where he engaged with the critical theory of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes and Situationist Guy Debord.
Barthes’ work on semiotics, Mythologies (1957), was particularly formative for Montgomery, in his exploration of how speech and culturally enforced modes of communication shape how we think about the world. His poetry evolved from this interest in language and meaning, tapping into a collective consciousness to articulate universal feelings. The first iteration of this originated in his billboard poems, which were also fuelled by a passion for Modernist poetry. This involved co-opting advertising billboards and transforming these spaces of passive consumption into portals of poetic inspiration, providing a therapeutic and even spiritual space for reflection. By challenging the typically one-dimensional advertising speech of billboards with a more humanising voice, the artist offers an antidote to the spectacle of image-based culture. For Montgomery, the slowness of words commands our attention, inviting a moment of introspection. Inspired by the power of street art as an energising and democratising force, his works capture an interior voice that resonates with humanity and is accessible to all.
His billboard and light poems have been installed in urban spaces to connect with the psychogeography of a city: as well as being featured in the streets of Paris, London and New York, he was commissioned to create a site-specific work, Echoes of Voices in the High Towers, displayed in the grounds of Berlin’s former Tempelhof Airport. His work is held in collections around the world, including the Albright Knox in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinchuan and the LVMH Collection.
In the last few years Montgomery’s work has begun to be properly recognised by international museums. In 2021 the Albright Knox Museum in New York acquired his major large scale light work, The Stars Pulled Down for Real. In 2022 his work was included in ‘La Suite de l’Histoire’ at the Musée du Louvre in Paris (the Louvre’s first exhibition of contemporary art) and in 2023 Xavier Roland at the BAM Museum, in Mons, commissioned a series of 7 large scale public works from Montgomery to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of Surrealism. His work is hugely popular on the internet: the piece The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You has been shared online more than 20 million times.
His light work All Palaces are Temporary Palaces was featured at the Venice Biennale in 2011. He was the UK artist for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (the first Indian Contemporary Art Biennale) in 2012 and the Yinchuan Biennale in 2016. The latter was a 150-metre-long installation which spanned a river bridge outside the Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art, China.
Montgomery’s free verse, while tersely crafted, is replete with pathos, capturing a ghostly interior voice. This desire to create beauty from sadness parallels his other poetic influences, such as Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin. Montgomery finds magic in the mundane: from urban environments to vast, rugged landscapes, these works invite introspection and pause. While his poems and paintings are infused with melancholy, they are also hopeful: expressing faith in the power of art and nature to heal us.
The Surrealist poet André Breton is a significant influence on his writing, and he credits the Surrealists with ‘planting a seed in [his] mind that you can be, should be, a painter and a poet at the same time.’ Early 20th century French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, famed for his ‘calligrammes’, or concrete poetry, is also a significant influence on Montgomery, particularly in shaping his artistic process as simultaneously graphic and poetic. Montgomery is also the co-founder, along with his wife the poet Greta Bellamacina, of the poetry press New River Press, which publishes radical contemporary British poetry.
Most recently, Montgomery has returned to his artistic roots by painting landscapes, to which he has given increasing focus in the last two years. His light installations – setting poetry against twilit landscapes – although outwardly very contemporary, are, in Montgomery’s own words: ‘in some way, for me, an extension of 19th century Romantic landscape painting, with the ghosts of Caspar David Friedrich and Turner always present in my mind’ and this new series makes his deep connection to the tradition of landscape painting more explicit. Many of the paintings in this series have a physical relationship to the light works, based on the location of their installation. Often captured from the perspective of a moving vehicle, Montgomery superimposes lines of his poetry over the landscapes, in his characteristic bold capitalised font.
Montgomery’s recent M20 Paintings are images captured from his car window on the road between London and his studio in Kent. His painterly gestures in the M20 Paintings evoke the speed of a journey. The landscape here is seen in a brief glimpse: ‘you are hurtling by on the motorway, and you see brief glimpses of beauty, the landscape in sunlight, how the light plays on the trees in a beautiful field, glimpses of nature that you are kept separate from and can’t quite reach. There’s a longing to be in that landscape that, from the road, we can’t quite fulfil.’
Montgomery’s monumental light works and landscape paintings feature in 海角社区’s exhibition, Songs of the Open Road (July 2024). The exhibition, which explores the relationship between landscapes, journeys and the poetic tradition, introduces Montgomery as a 海角社区 artist.
