FARMINGTON — The UMF Art Gallery is excited to open its fall 2024 season with “Colloquy: Nature Vision Expression,” featuring the creative works of Brigitte Keller and Antoinette Prien Schultze.

The artwork will be on exhibit from Sept. 19 through Oct. 25, 4-7 p.m., and is free and open to the public. The gallery will hold an opening reception for the exhibit on Thursday, Sept. 19, 4-7 p.m., including an artists’ talk and Q&A at 5:30 p.m.

The artists are longtime friends whose artwork forms a rich conversation on abstraction, process, material, natural form and modern design.

Prien Schultze’s monumental sculptures speak to the resilience of the threatened natural world, while the deceptively complex, layered surfaces of Keller’s immersive paintings evoke both the enduring and transient aspects of nature. Both artists’ abstractions are inflected by their deep connections to classical music, especially Bach.

Prien Schultze uses the muscular, enduring natures of wood and stone as a matrix for carved abstracted forms that evoke our common humanity. She flags each sculpture with ethereal colored glass, suggesting the increasing fragility and vulnerability of humanity and the natural environment. The opposition between strength and fragility represents the ever present balancing act of nature, precarious amidst the wonder and dignity of our Earth.

She began her artistic career as an operatic soprano as well as an opera coach at the New England College of Music. She is a self-taught sculptor since the late 1960s, moving away from realism to abstraction and developing an increasingly monumental scale in both her studio artworks and public art commissions. Her work is represented in many museum and institution collections.

Keller draws from Maine’s marshy coast to create visual dialogues with color, line and space. She uncovers emblematic shapes emerging from abstract color fields that evoke nostalgia and remembered landscapes beyond her immediate experience. Her acrylic egg/wax mixed-media surfaces evoke the early Renaissance frescoes in their subtle, suggestive textures.

Keller was born and raised in Paderborn, Germany; she holds dual citizenship in Germany and the U.S. She studied at the Académie der Künste in Berlin, the Art Students League in NYC, New York University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her work has been exhibited across the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Keller’s contributions to Colloquy present a retrospective of her work since 1984.

The UMF Art Gallery is dedicated to bringing contemporary art to the campus and regional communities. The gallery is located at 246 Main Street, behind the Admissions Office.

Gallery hours are Tuesdays-Sundays 12-4 p.m., and by appointment. Please contact Sarah at [email protected] or 207-778-1062 for more information or to make an appointment. https://www.artgalleryumf.org/.

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