Halcyon Gallery has announced the representation of Scottish-born, London-based contemporary artist and poet Robert Montgomery.
Robert Montgomery emerged into public consciousness in the 2010s when he began posting his poetry over billboards and bus stops in East London. These endeavours earned him the nickname ‘The Banksy of Poetry’. Today, his work is exhibited worldwide and by major institutions, including New York’s Albright Knox Museum and the Musée du Louvre.
Montgomery is also well known for his evocative light installations, billboard poems, fire poems, woodcuts, paintings, and watercolours. He began to make 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 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.
Having established himself as one of the world’s leading conceptual artists, Montgomery’s decision to sign with Halcyon Gallery marks a new chapter in his accomplished career. Exhibited in the gallery’s flagship location 148 New Bond Street is a new series of landscape paintings overlaid with poetry, marking a new direction for the artist. They hang in dialogue with Bob Dylan’s American landscapes, showing how two very different artists express journeys from unique perspectives.
Exploring how the constant flood of images in the modern world has alienated us from our authentic voice, Montgomery’s works explore political and ecological themes, with particular focus on the tension between the digital and natural world. He says,
I see a contemporary world where our consciousness is being increasingly invaded by digital media, and a digital world that seems to be designed to both sell us things, and to create conflict between us. I think our contemporary struggle is to free ourselves from the technological and digital world and put ourselves back into the natural world
This sentiment is expressed clearly in his works When We Are Gone/ The Trees Will Riot and the recently created M20 Paintings, which melancholically reveal views of intangible landscapes seen through car windows.
His painterly gestures in the M20 Paintings, now on view at Halycon Gallery, evoke the speed of a journey. Montgomery said,
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 work finds magic in the mundane: from urban environments to vast, rugged landscapes, these works welcome 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. This desire to create beauty from sadness parallels his poetic influences, such as Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin.
Montgomery’s monumental light works and landscape paintings are on view now at Halcyon Gallery’s exhibition, Songs of the Open Road. The exhibition, which explores the relationship between landscapes, journeys and the poetic tradition, has introduced Montgomery as a Halcyon Gallery artist.
On signing with Halcyon Gallery, Montgomery said,
I am enormously excited, the standard of the curatorial work at the gallery is world-class. Their recent Warhol exhibition was museum quality, brilliantly researched and put together, and educated me on a period of Warhol’s work that I wasn’t deeply familiar with.
Undoubtedly Halcyon is one of the most important contemporary art galleries in London, but there is also a generosity of spirit and an openness to the gallery – the doors are always open and they welcome you in whether or not you are a big collector- and that openness, that desire to enthusiastically share art with an audience, and to educate, is something that is very important to me.
You can see work from Robert Montgomery in the exhibition Songs of the Open Road at Halcyon Gallery’s flagship at 148 New Bond Street through September 1st 2024.
About the artist
Robert Montgomery, born in Scotland, studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art, where he cultivated a deep passion for poetry. His creative journey began with an exploration of how words and visuals intersect, leading him to experiment with various forms of artistic expression. After relocating 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 simultaneously challenging capitalist symbols in the urban landscape.
In 2008, personal grief pushed Montgomery into a more intimate creative direction, resulting in his first light-based work, The People You Love. This poignant expression of sorrow and love resonated deeply with audiences, becoming part of many people’s journeys through bereavement and healing. Montgomery’s work, grounded in universal themes, democratizes poetry, blending spiritual and physical reflections. Though his text is always presented in a distinct, recognizable font, his installations vary in material and form, adapting to the environments they inhabit. From light installations to burning letters, woodcut pieces to paintings, Montgomery creates a diverse body of work. His pieces often engage with their surroundings, serving as commentary on the local history, as seen in his 2023 light work in Somers Town, London.
