Anne J. Banks

The pairing of these two artists in a single exhibition, one a painter, the other a photographer, is especially fortunate as they are both concerned with nature and landscape in different yet compatible ways. Montgomery sees landscape from the rarified view of spatial distance, an aerial vision that combines geometric abstraction with smoothly rendered natural forms, related by color. While von zur Muehlen probes deeply into the inner space of ponds and vegetation seeking the essence of living plants and their nutrient sources.

Nan Montgomery sees natural form as oppositions of geometry and organic shape - of flowers, hills and plains, all inhabiting a space hovering in a breathless atmosphere of poetic unreality. There is a tentative withdrawal from a commitment to specific spatial context, a separation between the landscape plane and the geometric bands of color. The artist appears to be zooming in on a natural scene, or on a close up view of a flower without actually resolving the connection between abstraction and naturalism. Aesthetically, however, it is the vertical bands of color which function as color codes which give us the intellectual information we need to relate to the natural forms which come alive in the context of their atmospheric color. Montgomery brings this dichotomy off very well through the relationships between the color bands and the colors of the landscape forms which tie the works together. As the bands of color can also be read as space, color is the true reality of these paintings. It has been remarked that the bands of color act here like windows looking out on a landscape; however, they actually function more as clues to integrate the interior (psychological) and exterior (visual) aspects of our experience of art.

While Montgomery's paintings release the viewer into the realms of ethereal space, von zur Muehlen's photographs probe the depths of quiet reality, relating the worlds of science and aesthetic beauty. She makes use of chance to the degree that it is an accepted ingredient in her work as it is in nature, while Montgomery recreates nature as a construct of form, color and intellectual thought. Both artists bring to light the inherent poetry of nature as they interpret its many meanings.

Jean Lawlor Cohen

Nan Montgomery describes her work as "meditation," and indeed these recent paintings seem derived from solitude—times alone in the studio, nature walks in silence.

Major pieces like March Day, August, and Requiem imply her current line of inquiry. In each, color and geometry confront traditional matters, and the result is a slightly uneasy surrealism. A cyclamen looms with absurdity of scale. Bands of color meet landscape and perform a Magritte-like flip to become window frame and vista. In Scoriae, slag heaps spotted near a highway tunnel inspire a teasing game of equivalents. Their shapes morph from rain-carved hills to folding fabric, then back to dunes again.

Montgomery has not discarded formal issues for storytelling, however. She studied with Josef Albers, after all, and her devotion to color interplay has never waned. Even in Restriction, a large work yoking an in-your-face lily to hard-edge stripes, the palette defies botanical reason, and what reads as black turns out to be subliminal midnight blue. In the enigmatic Beyond, a surreal scene—a candle burning against a daylight view—becomes a study of refraction, with arcs of yellow haloes, a pyramid of darker rays.

Despite her intuitive brushwork and improvisations of color, Montgomery concerns herself first with what a shape can hold. In effect, she starts with a limitation of the canvas itself—the tondo, the rectangle and always the square. In Wide World, for example, the canvas presents as both a single block and a gridded plane, then, almost as an after-image, a cross on ground. During Montgomery's years as a pure abstractionist, her fascination with cruciform linked her to the geometry of Ad Reinhardt. Now, with these novel passages of landscape and still life, the cross becomes an armature for panels and, since she claims no interest in religious metaphor, a secular "altarpiece."

Though Montgomery now substitutes glimpses of nature for solid flat color, she still maneuvers these components with an abstractionist's hand. And because the new work so clearly documents her moment-to-moment choices, it has the look of compelling thought.

Troyer Gallery

Both painter Nan Montgomery and photographer Bemis von zur Muehlen love the line. In Nan Montgomery's latest work she retains some of the hard-edged geometric lines of past paintings and adds the sinuous lines from nature. Bemis von zur Muehlen in her pond-side color photographs lingers on the lines of reeds and branches and creates abstractions in which lines between water, land, leaf, and reflection are blurred.

Like many painters during the nineties, Montgomery is working to bring together abstract and figurative elements. Her bold stripes reminiscent of Barnett Neuman and Gene Davis appear in most of her colorful paintings. In all but the large dynamic Restriction, the stripes form subtle cruciforms which function as windows. Through these windows, distant landscapes emerge. In Restriction the broad bands of color interrupt the equally aggressive lily. There is a sense that contemplation of the land provides peace, but in Restriction we see that peace is possibly threatened. In all her thoughtful paintings, Montgomery takes us back and forth between the two great American subjects, landscape and abstraction, with dazzling style.

Nan Montgomery received her BFA from Yale University, where she studied with Josef Albers. She has also studied art at the Corcoran School and the Boston Museum School. Her work has been exhibited in a number of one person and group exhibitions since 1976, and is in a number of distinguished collections including that of the Corcoran Gallery of Art.