Ambera Wellmann
Ambera Wellmann is a Canadian painter who depicts human bodies in between play and violence, movement and dissolution. Curator Sonja-Maria Borstner notes that the artist’s liquid brushstrokes generate a peculiar arena for non-binary identities whose ‘contested terrain’ is constantly under litigation and boundary passing. Raised in a ‘dreary log cabin in the middle of the woods’, with no indoor plumbing in remote Nova Scotia, Canada, Wellmann has recently moved between densely populated metropolitan areas, including Berlin and Mexico City, and now resides in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York.
Wellmann originally studied at Cooper Union School of Art, New York NY in 2010. She later qualified for a BFA at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University, Halifax, Canada (2011) and earned her MFA from University of Guelph, Canada in 2016. In 2010 she was awarded the Joseph Beuys Memorial Scholarship, and she was Artist in Residence at Arteles Creative Centre, Hämeenkyro, Finland in 2013.
Wellmann has attracted international critical approbation for paintings that depict worlds within worlds, populated by human and animal forms emerging from and dissolving into each other and the atmosphere. Rendered in oils with a technical dexterity that recalls the work of Renaissance and Baroque masters, her canvases are filled with unanchored figures and disembodied faces, shimmering swaths of illumination and darkness, anachronistic details and indeterminate spaces that circle and move in defiance of hierarchy, pointing instead to metamorphosis, vulnerability and collectivity as subjects. In their refusal of familiar typologies and binaries, Wellmann’s apparitions exist in a space where multiple contradictory experiences happen at once —the violent and the tender, carnal and spiritual, abject and transcendent, and the simply inexplicable— at the threshold of a future in which viewers are compelled to imagine themselves as participants.
Her work has been said to bear a conceptual likeness to writers like William Blake (1757 – 1827), Georges Bataille (1897 – 1962), Simone Weil (1909 – 1943) and Julia Kristeva (born 1941) as well as painters like Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954), Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992) and 19th century Romantic painting. While living in Berlin, Wellmann also became more deeply engaged in art history. The influence of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450 – 1516), Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525 – 1569), Francisco de Goya (1746 – 1828), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780 – 1867) and Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877), as well as Italian Renaissance, Netherlandish and Spanish Baroque masters, emerged more palpably in her paintings through an increasingly deft command of illusory space and form. In addition to historical precedents, Wellmann also draws from contemporary sources as diverse as pornographic photography and video, screenshots from Instagram and other digital sources, and observational drawings she made on the streets or in the subway.
Wellmann’s paintings are constructed from numerous layers of intricately worked wet oils, often depicting nebulous human and animal forms, sometimes in extremis or entwined in states of ecstasy, figurative in only a tenuous sense. ‘I am often just looking for an arrangement with the bodies that actually feels impossible,’ Wellmann says, ‘in order to create a diagram for what kind of infinite possibilities the body can have.’ Hauser & Wirth’s webpage states:
Wellmann’s work accrues through what she has described as a visual version of catachresis, the process in which a word is deliberately deployed incorrectly; her ‘painterly catachresis’ manifests through irrational pictorial space and the depiction of an indeterminate number of bodies, genders, species, all without any predetermined visual hierarchy. Wellmann’s art thus occurs at the frontier where the known meets the uncanny, ‘the moment in which things become impossible, either figuratively or spatially, but which still register in a way that makes formal sense,’ she explains. ‘This uncertainty is a form of intimacy (something unrecognizable is, oddly, the place in which we can recognize ourselves the most).’
Wellmann is frequently exhibited internationally and her more significant solo exhibitions include In medias res, Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico (2019); UnTurning, MoCO, Montpellier, France (2019); Logic of Ghosts, K-T-Z, Berlin, Germany (2021); Nosegay Tornado, Company Gallery, New York NY, USA (2021); Ambera Wellmann, Pond Society, Shanghai, China; UnTurning, The MAC, Belfast, Northern Ireland (2021) and Antipoem, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2023).
Her work is represented in public collections like Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus OH, USA; ICA Miami, Miami FL, USA; MFA Boston, Boston MA, USA; Mudam, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg; Philara Collection, Dusseldorf, Germany; Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger, Norway and X Museum, Beijing, China.
Since December 2023, Wellmann is jointly represented by Hauser & Wirth and Company Gallery.
Copyright Firestorm Foundation
