Bon Accord Baths will host the festival’s first ever indoor artwork this April.
Robert Montgomery was part of Nuart Aberdeen from the very beginning. His text-based piece at Jopps Lane, created during the first festival in 2017, is still on the wall. Now he’s returning with an 11-metre-long illuminated installation inside Bon Accord Baths. It’s the first time the festival has produced an indoor work.
The baths have been closed for years, but the Art Deco building remains one of the most recognisable in Aberdeen. Bon Accord Heritage, the group working towards reopening it, is providing the space. Most people haven’t been able to set foot inside for a long time, and now they’ll get to walk in and encounter a major artwork.
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Illuminated poems
Montgomery’s practice centres on illuminated text, large-scale visual poems in illuminated words. The installation is being billed as his most ambitious project yet with Nuart Aberdeen curator Martyn Reed, who described it as “a clarion call for love and empathy towards those less fortunate than ourselves.” That language is grand, but Montgomery’s work has always operated at that pitch. It suits the setting.
The piece won’t stay at Bon Accord Baths permanently, though there are plans to find it a lasting home somewhere in the city after the festival. Montgomery will unveil the installation at a public opening on Wednesday 22 April, with the festival running through to Sunday 26 April.
Across the city
Aberdeen Inspired has applied to the council for permission to use several other walls and spaces across the city centre. The artists announced so far work across stencil portraiture, subvertising, landscape painting traditions, textiles and sculpture, which gives the lineup a broader spread than you sometimes see at street art festivals.
Glasgow-based James Klinge, who creates figurative portraits using hand-cut stencils and spray paint, will work on the Ibis Hotel on Shiprow. London-based dr.d AKA Subvertiser, who uses cut-and-paste techniques borrowed from the fly-posting industry of the 1990s to rework billboards and bus stops, takes on North East Scotland College on the Gallowgate.
Some of the walls and spaces across Aberdeen city centre that will be transformed during Nuart Aberdeen 2026
More walls, more approaches
HICKS, a London mural artist whose practice draws on the tradition of sublime landscape painting in British Romanticism, has two sites: the Merkur Casino on Summer Street and Denburn Road. Molly Hankinson, an English-born artist based in Glasgow whose work explores personal and collective gendered experiences, will be at Nickel & Dime on Crooked Lane. Trackie McLeod, a Scottish artist also based in Glasgow who works across sculpture, textiles, video and print, has Rennies Wynd at the Green. The Rebel Bear, a Scottish street artist who has been putting up work across the country and internationally for the past decade, will work on Chapel Street Car Park.
These join the mural already underway by Aberdeen-born artist KMG at the Cruickshank Botanic Garden on the University of Aberdeen campus in Old Aberdeen. More walls and artists are still to be announced.
The theme
This year’s festival theme is Poetry Is In The Streets. Adrian Watson, chief executive of Aberdeen Inspired, said the organisation was pleased to welcome Montgomery back to the city: “He is, as it were, one of the founding fathers of Nuart Aberdeen and I can think of no better location for his work than Bon Accord Baths.”
Nuart Aberdeen runs from 22 to 26 April. Check out our earlier article about the 2026 artist line-up.
