Oneiric and playful, Wellmann’s canvases redirect the male gaze and the appropriation of women’s bodies throughout the history of painting. For the biennial, Wellmann is presenting a series of works that depict unstable, body-like forms in states of metamorphosis, hallucination or transition. In Impingeneous, fleshy, pink forms – reminiscent of animals or humans – float on a yellow canvas background. In Seeding, these forms are ambiguously fruits or animals, comingling on a blue field. Orison and Loining take up, concretely yet playfully, the erotic nude and coital encounters, teasing out the awkwardness of bodies and the strangeness of humans’ relations to other life forms, and to one another.
Ambera Wellmann (b. 1982, Lunenburg, Canada) is based in Berlin, Germany. In Wellmann’s recent paintings, pop cultural, pornographic and art historical references commingle in vibrant, often perverse human spaces. With figures poised between action and passivity, Wellmann’s works examine the dynamics between eroticism, politics and power through a shifting set of spatial relationships and fluid materiality. Recent solo exhibitions include In medias res, Lulu, Mexico City (2019); Forthcoming, MoCO Montpellier, France (2019); and (Wo)man and Beast in the Round of Their Need, Projet Pangee, Montreal (2018). Group exhibitions include MoMA Warsaw, Poland (2019); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2019).
EXHIBITED WORKS
Orison, 2018
Oil and soft pastel on linen
51 × 56 cm
Courtesy the artist and PCP Collection.
Presented with the support of PCP Collection and Canada Council for the Arts.
WYRD, 2018
Oil and acrylic on linen
49 × 52 cm
Courtesy the artist and Defares Collection.
Presented with the support of Defares Collection and Canada Council for the Arts.
Seeding, 2019
Oil on linen
52 × 49 cm
Courtesy the artist and Ann Hatch.
Presented with the support of Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Ann Hatch and Canada Council for the Arts.
Impingenous, 2019
Oil on linen
49 × 52 cm
Courtesy the artist and Adam Green Art Advisory.
Presented with the support of Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Adam Green Art Advisory and Canada Council for the Arts.
Loining, 2018
Oil, acrylic and soft pastel on linen
92 × 96 cm
Courtesy the artist and Mauro De Iorio.
Presented with the support of Mauro De Iorio and Canada Council for the Arts.
Gyre, 2019
52 x 49 cm
Oil on linen
Courtesy the artist.
