Halcyon Gallery has announced the representation of Scottish-born, London-based contemporary artist and poet Robert Montgomery.
Robert Montgomery came to public attention in the 2010s when he began posting his poems on billboards and bus shelters in East London. These efforts earned him the nickname “The Banksy of poetry”. Today his works are exhibited worldwide and by major institutions, including the Albright Knox Museum in New York and the Musée du Louvre.
Montgomery is also known for his impressive light installations, poster poems, fire poems, woodcuts, paintings and watercolors. He began working with light works after the American artist James Turrell, pioneer of the Light and space movement, visited his studio at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in the 1990s. He has also cited the works of Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner as influences; conceptual artists who also cross the line between fine art and the written word.
Montgomery has established himself as one of the world’s leading conceptual artists and his decision to sign with Halcyon Gallery marks a new chapter in his successful career. On display at the gallery’s flagship store, 148 New Bond Street, is a new series of landscape paintings, infused with poetry and marking a new direction for the artist. They are in dialogue with Bob Dylan’s American landscapes and show how two very different artists express travel from unique perspectives.
Montgomery’s works explore how the constant flood of images in the modern world has alienated us from our authentic voices, engaging with political and environmental issues, focusing particularly on the tension between the digital and natural worlds. He says:
I see a modern world where our consciousness is increasingly permeated by digital media, and a digital world that seems designed to sell us things and create conflict between us. I think our struggle today is to free ourselves from the technological and digital world and bring ourselves back to the natural world.
This feeling is clearly expressed in his works When we are gone/ The trees will riot and the recently created M20 paintings, which melancholically reveal views of immaterial landscapes through car windows.
His painterly gestures in M20 paintings, now on view at the Halycon Gallery, evoke the speed of a journey. Montgomery said:
You speed by on the highway and see brief moments of beauty, the landscape in sunlight, the way the light plays on the trees in a beautiful field, glimpses of nature that you are separate from and can’t really reach. There is a longing to be in that landscape that we can’t quite fulfill from the road.
Montgomery’s work finds magic in the everyday: from urban settings to vast, rugged landscapes, these works invite self-reflection and pause. While his poems and paintings are steeped in melancholy, they are also hopeful: they express a belief in the power of art and nature to heal us. This desire to create beauty from sadness is in keeping with his poetic influences, such as Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin.
Montgomery’s monumental light works and landscape paintings are now on display in the Halcyon Gallery’s exhibition Sons of the open road. The exhibition, which explores the relationship between landscapes, travel and the poetic tradition, introduced Montgomery as a resident artist of the Halcyon Gallery.
When signing the contract with Halcyon Gallery, Montgomery said:
I am enormously excited, the curatorial work at the gallery is world class. Their recent Warhol exhibition was museum quality, superbly researched and curated, and enlightened me about a period of Warhol’s work that I was not very familiar with.
Halcyon is undoubtedly one of the most important contemporary art galleries in London. But there is also a spirit of generosity and openness within the gallery – the doors are always open and everyone is welcome, whether you are a major collector or not. And this openness, this desire to share and communicate art with an audience with enthusiasm, is something that is very important to me.
You can see works by Robert Montgomery in the exhibition Songs of the open road at the Halcyon Gallery flagship store at 148 New Bond Street until 1 September 2024.
About the artist
Born in Scotland, Robert Montgomery studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art, where he developed a deep passion for poetry. His creative journey began with exploring the interface between words and images, which led him to experiment with different forms of artistic expression. After moving to London in the early 2000s, Montgomery introduced “visual poems” – text-based installations displayed on billboards. Through these works, he made both art and poetry accessible to the public while challenging capitalist symbols in the urban landscape.
In 2008, personal grief led Montgomery to pursue a more intimate creative direction, resulting in his first light-based work, The people you love. This poignant expression of grief and love resonated with audiences and became part of many people’s grief and healing journey. Based on universal themes, Montgomery’s work democratizes poetry, blending spiritual and physical reflections. Although his text is always presented in a clearly recognizable font, his installations vary in material and form, adapting to the environment in which they are located. From light installations to burning letters, woodcuts to paintings, Montgomery creates a diverse body of work. His pieces often interact with their surroundings and serve as a commentary on local history, as demonstrated by his 2023 light work in Somers Town, London.
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