10 Sep –
24 Oct 2020
Ambera Wellmann
Ambera Wellmann
Ambera Wellmann, Landscape with a Figure of a Woman, 2020, Courtesy: the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photo: Ramiro Chaves
“The eye is no longer the proxy, or the privileged instrument, of the painting subject. In the case of Ambera Wellmann, the subject has this in particular: he/she exceeds gender, species, realm.”
Nicolas Bourriaud
This is the first German solo exhibition by Canadian-born painter Ambera Wellmann. Wellmann’s works encourage an experience of uncertain intimacy. Portraying human and, on occasion, animal bodies, the figures within her work commingle into numberless, genderless corporealities, resisting the performative power dynamics present in the Western canon of figuration from which she gleans. Wellmann probes the expansive potentiality of a layered array of art-historical syntaxes that span Medieval Art, Romanticism, and Surrealism, allowing viewers to negotiate them anew. Wellmann’s works embrace the unpredictable possibilities of an internal gaze, refusing a heteronormative one. Reflected by a process that embraces chance, error, and vulnerability, Wellmann works in a distinctly feminist and queered perspective.
Ambera Wellmann, The Logic of Ghosts, 2020. Courtesy: the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin. Photo: Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy
“The primary strength of Ambera Wellmann’s painting consists in asserting art as a commutator of viewpoints, which allows her to deeply bury the phallocentric, anthropocentric gaze—in short, everything that represents centrality today.”
Nicolas Bourriaud
Ambera Wellmann, born in 1982, in Nova Scotia, lives and works in Mexico City and New York. Her work has been shown at MOCO, Montpellier (2019, solo); Istanbul Biennial (2019); MoMA Warsaw (2019); Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); Projet Pangée, Montreal, (2018, solo); Office Baroque, Brussels (2018); Regional Centre for Contemporary Art, Sète (2018); Arsenal Contemporary, New York (2018); Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2018); Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, Dupont Projects Toronto, (2016, solo). Wellmann has an upcoming solo exhibition at MAC Belfast (2020, solo), and Company Gallery, New York (2020, solo).