This week on my podcast, “About Art” I spoke with the British contemporary artist Robert Montgomery. Montgomery is well known for his work in public space. He makes light works, billboard poems, fire poems, paintings and watercolors. His work brings text art closer to the language of poetry. 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, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. He has had solo museum projects at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, Oklahoma Contemporary in Oklahoma City, and the Cer Modern Museum in Ankara. His work was recently included in the Musée du Louvre exhibition “La Suite de l’Histoire” in Paris. His work is hugely popular on the internet, the piece “The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You” has been shared online more than 200 million times.
He and Zuckerman discuss the gentle 90 percent, kindness, grief, love outlasting death, the temporary nature of power and wealth, modernist poetry, how to be a painter and poet at the same time, devotional reflection, having conversations with people across time, the magic in the mundane, light, and mentorship!