Ambera Wellmann

Ambera 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 (b. 1982, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia) lives and works in New York. Wellmann is a graduate of Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University, Halifax, Canada, and received her Masters of Fine Arts from University of Guelph, Canada. Her work has been shown at Stavanger Art Museum, Norway (2023); the ICA Boston (2022); Palazzo Bollani, Venice (2022); New Museum Triennial, New York (2021); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2021); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (2021); MAC Belfast (2021, solo); Pond Society, Shanghai (2021, solo); The Emerald Tablet, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Present Generations, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus (2021); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2020, solo); Drawing Center, New York (2020); Company Gallery (2020, solo); 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). Upcoming shows include Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (2023, solo).

Her work is in the collections of:

Philara Collection, Dusseldorf

Stavanger Art Museum, Norway

MUDAM, Luxembourg

Aishti Foundation, Beirut

Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus

ICA Miami, Miami

MFA Boston

X Museum, Beijing