Robert Montgomery
I feel that we are
in a state of collective trauma
Robert Montgomery is a British contemporary artist. He makes light works, billboard poems, fire poems, paintings and watercolours. He represented the UK in the 2012 Kochi Biennale and the 2016 Yinchuan Biennale. His work is in museum collections across the world including the Albright Knox in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and was recently included in the Musée du Louvre exhibition La Suite de l’Histoire in Paris. Montgomery's piece The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You has been shared online more than 200 million times.
TRAVELLING THROUGH LANDSCAPES WITH ROBERT MONTGOMERY
Did you always know you wanted to be an artist? How did your story with art begin?
I’ve always wanted to be an artist, ever since I was 13 or 14 and, you know, I don’t think you have a choice. My family were working-class from Scotland and didn’t know any artists. They thought it would be impossible and my father [laughs] thought that becoming an artist would mean that I would end up as a homeless person. He was really against it and wanted me to become a lawyer, so that was my first battle.
I don’t know why, but I was obsessed by the landscape paintings of JMW Turner and Caspar David Friedrich and all those 19th-century Romantic painters. Later, I also really loved the poetry of the French Surrealists like André Breton.
Given that you weren’t discussing French Surrealists or 19th-century landscape artists at the dinner table, how did you come across them as a child, given there was no internet back then?
I had a really great teacher in high school called John McKerrell who was like my mentor, and he really took care of me—even physically, as I attended quite a rough comprehensive and I used to go to school dressed as a mini Oscar Wilde in a velvet suit with a cravat, like some young aesthete and would be on the receiving end of quite a lot of aggression.