Robert Montgomery (artist)

Robert Montgomery (born 7th July c. 1972) is a Scottish-born, London-based poet, artist, and sculptor known for his site-specific installations which are created from light and text, as well as his "fire poems". Montgomery works in a "melancholic post-Situationist" tradition, primarily in public spaces.

Early career and education
Robert Montgomery was born in 1972 in the village of Chapelhall, Scotland, to David and Janette Montgomery. Aged 16, Montgomery was accepted to study fine art at the Edinburgh College of Art.

Montgomery left with a first undergraduate degree in painting and later obtained a Master of Fine Arts. While still students, 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 They were awarded £40,000, but the grant was not intended for students, and was nearly withdrawn.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, and as a result the project went forward with the help of the grant.

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

In his early career, Montgomery experimented with creating minimalist sculptures with elaborate poetic titles. Eventually, Montgomery dropped the sculptures altogether and began to focus on the combination of verbal and visual presentation. 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."

In 1999, Montgomery moved to London, where he wrote for the magazine Dazed & Confused.

Work
Often installed unauthorised amid industrial and urban sites, Montgomery's installations address themes such as power, love, and human kindness with sparse language and dramatic visuals. These text-based conceptual pieces are categorised as recycled sunlight pieces, billboard pieces, fire poems, woodcut panels, and watercolors. Montgomery's cryptic 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.

Montgomery's black and white poems pasted on London billboards have, 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 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 exhibited 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.

Process and inspiration
Montgomery was initially inspired by the graffiti artists of East London, the poetry of Philip Larkin, the philosophy of Guy Debord, and the French student protesters of May 1968. Montgomery became interested in the Situationist tradition while following the writing of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard during his time at Edinburgh College of Art. Montgomery also cites lyricists as important influencers, as his poems often mirror the tone and structure commonly used by songwriters. Montgomery describes his process as being random and unpredictable: "You quite often get stuff at like 2 o'clock in the morning and kind of see what you've got. I quite like that process". In selecting a platform for his art, Montgomery was inspired by Jenny Holzer and Felix Gonzalez-Torres' use of billboard space.

In early 2016, Montgomery became a supporter for Julius Meinl with their 'Pay with a Poem' concept for World Poetry Day, whereby customers could, for one day only, have coffee at one of their branches and instead of money could pay for it by writing a poem; encouraging them to think about poetry as a form of self expression.

Publications
Robert Montgomery's Echos of Voices in the High Towers was published by Mono Kultur in 2012. The Book is A2 in size, folding out to A1 in size, divided into three parts, and serves as a complete publication of Montgomery's work.

On first arriving in London, Montgomery became involved in the monthly style magazine Dazed & Confused, a magazine where he is still an associate publisher.

In 2016, Montgomery and his partner, Greta Bellamacina, launched their own publishing company called New River Press.

Exhibitions
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 and the Anna Jill Lupertz Gallery in Berlin.

Personal life
Montgomery lives in London. He is married to Greta Bellamacina with whom he has two children.