Background
Robert Montgomery was born in 1972 in Chapelhall, North Lanarkshire, Scotland. He is a son of David and Janette Montgomery.
2013
Robert Montgomery at Flaunt Magazine and Wildfox Present ‘Hollywood Lawn’ A Fire Poem Performance at Mana Wynwood on in 2013 in Miami, Florida. Photo by Jamie McCarthy.
Edinburgh College of Art, 74 Lauriston Pl, Edinburgh EH3 9DF, United Kingdom
Edinburgh College of Art where Robert Montgomery obtained a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees.
Robert Montgomery (center) in the studio. Photo by Anna Dorothea Ker.
Robert Montgomery (center) working in the studio. Photo by Anna Dorothea Ker.
Robert Montgomery sketching. Photo by Anna Dorothea Ker.
Robert Montgomery. Photo by Anna Dorothea Ker.
Robert Montgomery’s ‘Kochi Biennale Piece’ purchased at Saffronart Mumbai for $3,510 in 2019.
Robert Montgomery under one of his billboard poetry. Photo by Thea Goldberg.
(Left to right) Gabby Gay, Robert Montgomery, and Martin Gooding.
Robert Montgomery
Robert Montgomery with his works on the background.
Robert Montgomery performs at Flaunt Magazine and Wildfox Present ‘Hollywood Lawn’ at Mana Wynwood in 2013 in Miami, Florida. Photo by Jamie McCarthy.
Robert Montgomery was born in 1972 in Chapelhall, North Lanarkshire, Scotland. He is a son of David and Janette Montgomery.
Robert Montgomery was first introduced to the world of poetry and art by one of his high-school teachers, John McKerrell whose inspirational energy he later compared with a character of John Keating from Dead Poets Society. Montgomery discovered such renowned poets such as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes with the help of another educator, Mr. Enoch Currie.
In 1988, Robert became a student of Edinburgh College of Art where he received a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees from Edinburgh College of Art.
The start of Robert Montgomery’s career can be counted from the period of 1995 - 1997 when he served as an artist in residence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He started from making sculptures with voluminous titles and soon, inspired by the iconic representatives of conceptualism from his youth, like Lawrence Wiener and Jenny Holzer, had an idea to make the written as the meaningful part of the visual art. Graffiti on buses and walls were among his first attempts in the area.
In 1999, Montgomery left his native Scotland and relocated to the United Kingdom. He settled down in London and joined the staff of the style magazine Dazed & Confused as an author.
Montgomery debuted with his public space poetry installations in the early 2000s. One of the first works of that kind was his iconic installation of 2005 ‘Words in the city at night’. Since then, he has created lots of others, including posters, billboards, and light pieces, woodcuts, and watercolors as well. In 2011, his works were featured at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and a year later, he was chosen as the representative of the United Kingdom at the first biennale in India, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. That same year, the book collection of his works, ‘Echos of Voices in the High Towers’, saw publication. It was followed by his first monograph issued by Distanz publishing house three years later.
The artist has participated both in solo and group shows around Europe and Asia and has demonstrated his outdoor installations in many major public spaces, including the site of the old United States Air Force base at Tempelhof.
In 2016, Robert Montgomery along with his wife established their own publishing agency New River Press.
Nowadays, Montgomery lives and works in London, as an associate publisher in Dazed & Confused magazine as well.
Relocated from the galleries to the open spaces of city streets and in nature, Robert Montgomery’s works full of literature, philosophy, and art represent a kind of opposition to the advertising pervasive in the modern consumer-oriented society. The only difference is that the main goods of Montgomery’s art, inspiration, love, hope, and happiness, belong to a spiritual area, not to the material one. The artist characterizes himself as a “melancholic post-Situationist" and a representative of a 20th-century antiauthoritarian Marxist movement.
Frequently composing melancholic pieces, Montgomery is a proponent of the theory that the beauty rises from sadness.
In addition to the outdoor locations, Montgomery’s visual poetry is widely presented in social media, like Instagram, because he believes in the importance of self-publishing.
Quotations:
"The purpose of art is to touch the hearts of strangers without the trouble of having to meet them. But, if you can touch their hearts from a distance and help a little bit from your quiet studio then it's very nice."
"I think there's a certain slowness to words. I think we probably live in an age of accelerated image and we're bombarded with hundreds of images a day and in that context words can be a moment of quiet or pause."
"It’s kind of a melange of poetry and text art, what I do, in a sense. I want it to sit awkwardly between the two practices and be neither wholly defined by one or the other, so that my work makes a space for itself in between text art and poetry."
Robert Montgomery’s inspirations include a poet Philip Larkin, a philosopher Guy Debord, in the early days of his art, and the thinkers Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard later. Jenny Holzer and Felix Gonzalez-Torres had also an impact on his choice in terms of location of his art.
Quotes from others about the person
"To encounter the work of Robert Montgomery is to make a tender encounter whose tenderness is enhanced by the public, communal quality of his work. To encounter his work is to have your body filled with a sad thunder and your head filled with a sad light. He is a complete artist and works in language, light, paper, space. He engages completely with the urban world with a translucent poetry. His work arrives at us through a kind of lucid social violence. No one has blended language, form and light in such a direct way." Dane Weatherman, Black & Blue Journal
"Yes to this, and yes again. It's democratic art and democratic literature. I'd love to see (more of) it here in Britain." Edward Lucie-Smith, writer, poet, and art critic
Robert Montgomery met his future wife, a poet Greta Bellamacina, while she was redacting a book of romantic poetry and chose one of his poems to be featured in the publication. Bellamacina became his life-time collaborator.
In 2015, Greta gave birth to their first child named Lorca. Greta and Robert married two years later. The second child came to the world in 2019.