The world Ambera Wellmann paints is both unsettling and charming. Ghoulish figures and a boudoir color palette push towards nightmarish fantasy, yet Wellmann’s delicately rendered traces of familiarity tether us to a strange, alternate reality. Wine glasses, flowers in vases, and modernist cutlery anchor the scenes in figuration, but everything else erupts in a storm of tactile, thickly layered, and tightly lacquered paint. We are unsettled but, unlike in the work of Francis Bacon, to whom Wellmann is often compared, we do not feel afraid.
Darklings at Hauser & Wirth New York marks Wellmann’s debut exhibition with the gallery, following a co-representation deal struck late last year between the blue-chip giant and her longtime gallery, Company. In an unconventional but innovative move, Wellmann debuted two bodies of work on September 5, one at each gallery. The dual opening signals a rare but promising model for collaboration, offering a potential blueprint for emerging galleries that are often sidelined – or outright poached – by larger institutions.
I began the night at Hauser & Wirth, where Darklings opens with a painting that functions like a Cheshire Cat. Sirens is mounted in the center of an internal wall, partially obscuring the rest of the gallery and setting the tone for what’s to come – beckoning us into the twilight zone. A skeletal silhouette of a headless mermaid reclines on black sand before a perfectly barreling wave, one arm wrapped lazily around its own detached skull. The mermaid corpse looks serene, even at ease. It seems to tell us that the dead, the mysterious, and the weird are not shunned here – not buried seven feet under, outside the city walls – but cloaked in silver moonlight and given pride of place. Its hypnotizing shine beckons the wicked and the unafraid to come outside and play, even as the blackened sky heralds impending doom.
Wellmann’s headliner painting is mounted on the far wall of the gallery. People Loved and Unloved is an immense oil-on-linen diptych; two meters high and nearly four meters long. At first glance it appears to be an orgy of all things chthonian. A comparatively small figure floats just above the twisted, nightmarish strip club-come-banquet scene and is giving itself cunnilingus. I leant over to my friend who’d said ‘the ass licking is a little tacky’. It made me smirk. Perhaps that’s precisely the point. Some unholy-placed butthole humor prevents the painting from being too serious or too self-aware.
But this is a serious show with serious convictions, where inescapable and unequal death, our event-saturated times, social media rot, apocalypse, and climate catastrophe underscore our drive for pleasure. We are told that Wellmann’s paintings appear narrative but cannot be pinned down, that they are magical talismans that dazzle and awaken us. These paintings attest to a belief in figurative painting and its infinitely imaginative possibilities, while arts journalists erroneously attempt to announce that figurative is out, and the abstract and minimal is in. Both of Wellmann’s shows prove how preposterous that is, especially as they are so effectively contextualized by our saturated and expletive-inducing moment. Are they warnings, or an invitation to accept the inevitable and act accordingly? We might not want to inhabit this repulsive world, but we long to feel it in art like Wellmann’s.
At Company Gallery, Wellmann presents One Thousand Emotions, where painting is explicitly likened to sorcery. This body of work seems more varied than what’s on display in Darklings, and less formal. The more relaxed space, the immense charcoal murals of masked figures and a post mortem are less alienating than Hauser & Wirth’s dentist office cleanliness. The painting Banshee hangs on the far wall of the gallery and depicts a complicated sex act. One stands spreading their cheeks while another pulls them open and burrows his face in the other’s lower back. A face like a death mask stares back at us – exorcist style – between its legs, echoing her painting Death Masks Eternity in Darklings. Wellmann has painted a translucent rainbow that arcs across the figures, and a massive lunar eclipse emanates on the wall above.
Wellmann’s paintings feel like they emerge from a process of digesting the world. We might not love what comes out the other end, but we’d rather it did come out. It’s how we learn. There are art historical references and iPhones, copulation and death, movement and loitering. At times, it can feel like we’ve seen it all, but that’s an illusion. Wellmann assures us there are still many other worlds in the making.
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Ambera Wellmann was born in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1982. She attended Cooper Union School of Art, New York NY in 2010, completed a BFA at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University, Halifax, Canada, in 2011 and graduated with a MFA from the University of Guelph, Canada, in 2016. She lives and works in New York.
Siobhan O’Leary is an Australian writer and artist based in Paris.
