A mid career retrospective at the Burchfield Penney Art Center July 14-October 29

I’m very excited to announce my my upcoming exhibition Julian Montague: Projects at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY. This is going to be a mid-career exhibition that covers my work from the late 1990s to the present. It is mostly artwork but there will be a significant section of graphic design work as well. I am excited to bring together all of these different bodies of work. I’m curious to see how they speak to each other. The installation of the show will be pretty epic, but more about that later!

Jul 14, 2023 - Oct 29, 2023

Julian Montague: Projects is a mid-career retrospective exhibition of the work of the artist, graphic designer, and photographer’s work. This is the first time that examples from all of Montague’s different bodies of work will be presented together.

Since the late 1990s, Montague has been making art, with a multidisciplinary approach and an undercurrent of existential humor. Montague’s artwork takes many different forms, from multi-year conceptual investigations, to making ephemera for a fictional 1970s art institution, to hard-edged abstract paintings. Much of his work is concerned with exploring (and perhaps undermining) the systems of order that we use to make sense of the natural and human-made worlds. Works in the exhibition are executed using several mediums including painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, graphic design, fabric, and video.

The tools and visual language of graphic design play a large role in his artwork, overlapping his two practices which influence one another. A section of the exhibition will feature Montague’s client-based graphic design, including examples from his two decades of work for clients in Western New York, for the music and publishing industries, and in corporate collaborations with Continental Tires, Sonos, and Warby Parker.

The installation's centerpiece is a black-lined grid containing work from disparate projects on the curved wall at the south end of the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s East Gallery. The grid motif continues throughout the installation serving to frame and unite each body of work in the exhibition. 

Montague first came to national and international attention in the mid-2000s with his Stray Shopping Cart Identification System. The project set out to create a taxonomy to identify stray shopping carts based on the situations in which they were found. The resulting system of 2 classes and 33 subtypes, and its accompanying photographic documentation, was exhibited widely at the time and was ultimately published as a book, designed by the artist, by Abrams Books in 2006. A revised edition of The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, will be published by The University of Chicago Press in September 2023.

Montague was one of three people who followed a 120-mile bicycle route from Cleveland to Irondale, Ohio in 2018 that Charles E. Burchfield had ridden in the early 1920s. His photography and graphic design were featured prominently in the exhibition Home on My Bicycle which celebrated that tip, held at the Center in 2019.

The title of the exhibition is a nod to both to the multifaceted nature of the artist’s practice and to his nom de Internet, “Montague Projects.” In 2020 the New York Times named @montagueprojects on Instagram as one of the top five art accounts to follow. It currently has more than 123,000 followers and lists him as an artist, graphic designer, illustrator, cyclist and curator of mid-century book covers based in Buffalo, NY. 

Accepted into 2 Poster Biennials!

I’m happy to say that the poster I designed for my recent exhibition at Binghamton University has been selected for both the Biennial del Cartel Bolivia BICeBe and the 28th International Poster Biennale in Warsaw. I guess the jurors from both sides of the Atlantic agreed!

My Collaboration with Apply Stickers

Check out my collaboration with Apply here. For the set of stickers I created I pulled graphics from almost every part of my art and design career.

A Montague Projects Exibition at Maison Kitsune In NYC

I will be showing some of my recent fabric pieces this month at French fashion brand Maison Kitsune’s space in the West Village in New York, info below.

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“For 2021, we’ve curated especially for you a yearlong schedule of exhibitions and book launches, celebrating artists we love and support all around the world: welcome to Maison Kitsuné Gallery!

Join us for distinctive gallery events in our stores in Paris, New York City, Los Angeles and soon in Tokyo, or explore the artists’ works online at maisonkitsune.com.

From June 17th to July 11th, we’re pleased to welcome Julian Montague for an exclusive exhibition at Maison Kitsuné New York Perry-Archives & Gallery.

Julian Montague is an artist, illustrator and graphic designer based in Buffalo, New York. His artwork includes a wide range of mediums and approaches, from long term conceptual projects to geometric abstraction.

Much of his recent work is influenced by his fascination with the hard lines and soft shapes of modernist mid-century art and graphic design. His work has received attention from Dwell, Frieze, It’s Nice That, and many others.

The New York Times recently recommended his Instagram account as one of the top art accounts to follow. Montague has work in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Martin Z. Margulies, the Norton Museum of Art, the Progressive Insurance Company, and numerous private collections. 

www.montagueprojects.com

Discover more here  and RSVP for the opening night here.

Maison Kitsuné New York Perry-Archives & Gallery
108 Perry Street
Ground Floor
New York, NY 10014

Monday – Saturday: 12pm – 7pm
Sunday: 12pm – 6pm

Posters to Flatten the Curve + Coloring Pages

In this current time of crisis, I have been making posters encouraging social distancing. You can check out and download these and coloring pages here.

Wallpaintings at Play/Ground in Medina New York September 27-29, 2019

This year at Play/Ground I added to the wall paintings I made for last year’s iteration. 30+ artists made installations in an abandoned high school in Medina, NY.

This is what the original set of 2018 paintings looked like.

I was also asked to make coloring pages based on my paintings and the Play/Ground logo, which I designed.

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