Every painter has them: canvases so mired in doubt that they hide against a studio wall until some impulse of revision or erasure makes them fresh again.
For Ambera Wellmann, whose two shows open on Sept. 5 at the Company and Hauser & Wirth galleries in Manhattan — the problem painting was an eight-foot-tall diptych. In the middle of a studio visit in June, I asked what lay on the other side of that big pair of stretchers.
Wellmann winced, as if remembering a dentist appointment, but she propped up the two panels to face the room, stood back and assessed them, arms crossed and a toe tapping in her Prada sneaker. “I hate it,” she said.
The picture showed an enormous dead ram, lying against a field of black. One of its horns has curled around too far and impaled its jaw.
Wellmann had stumbled on the source photo online, a ram that appears to have been killed by its own horn. “I was fascinated by this idea that an object can be both itself and its own opposite,” she said. Oxymorons can do that, she said, but not often objects.
But so far her painting was “basic,” she said with a moan — the horizon too straight, the clouds too pat, the grasses of blue, white and mint surrounding the carcass too belabored. It didn’t share much with the perverse elegance that has led Wellmann, 43, to an unorthodox double-header show.
Wellmann belongs loosely to a generation of figurative artists who paint large, busy canvases that marry primordial human themes to a schizophrenia of painterly styles — a combination that reflects the horror-joys of the internet. Other artists in that vein are Ali Banisadr, Sanya Kantarovsky and Dana Schutz.
But Wellmann is notable for the way she displays moments of academically fine brushwork, which she purposely refuses to bring to its expected states of completion — and which clash, noisily and Bosch-like, with her subjects of grotesquerie and desire.
Company, which Wellmann joined in 2021, is a small, hip and dedicated gallery known for being queer and feminist friendly. Hauser & Wirth is a global dealership noted for its aggressive presence in New York museums. Simultaneous shows would normally scream conflict. But Wellmann’s is an example of Hauser & Wirth’s new strategic teaming up with — a cynic might say poaching of — small galleries who already have the loyalty of artists Hauser & Wirth wants to sign. with smaller galleries.
For Wellmann, this tag-team is not the corporate takeover it would seem. “There’s a lot of mutual respect,” she said. “They both also know and respect that I’m a person who basically likes to be left alone.” This is her second exhibition at Company. Her debut, during the coronavirus pandemic, was a “ghost town,” she recalled. This month’s show, only her second in New York, is a redo of sorts — and a testing ground for a new way to bring art into a shaky market with hesitant buyers.
Hauser & Wirth would get the ram and five others. Company would get five smaller works and an improvised mural on the gallery walls. (Completed last week, the mural took nine days. It shows a procession of animal appetites and deathly symbols in black on white, except for a palely colored rainbow stretching across the exact center of “Banshee,” a painting on linen hung atop the mural and depicting a woman’s spread anus. Floating above that orifice, in the mural, is a large solar eclipse.)
Among the Hauser stack in her studio was another tall diptych, done in butchery reds. This one cheered her up. Titled “People Loved and Unloved,” it stars two pole dancers. “For the longest time I thought strip clubs were these bropy, woman-hating places,” she said, “until I went to Jumbo’s Clown Room in L.A.,” where she saw more women in the crowd than onstage. Her eyes widened. “Have you been?”
That painting was finished. But its dancers, and the spectators, ghouls and banquet tables surrounding them, are painted in a sort of wraithlike vagueness. Only parts of them have been sharpened in high, wet definition. It is a Wellmann trick: The contrast of painterly clarity forces you to seek resolutions where they don’t exist, almost like chasing a pleasure to overindulgence.
Born in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, in 1982, Wellmann studied art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, in Halifax and received her M.F.A. from the University of Guelph in Ontario. She moved to Berlin. In 2017 the Royal Bank of Canada awarded her first place in its painting competition for a work from her series depicting glazed chinaware or porcelain objects in an exquisitely loose photorealism, menacingly cropped.
Into the 2020s, Wellmann moved to Mexico City with her wife (they have since split up), and then to New York, with her dog, Chicken, a Chinese crested. Her fixation on single images has metastasized into more complex scenery — bodies, struggles, liaisons, rituals — that retain her signature attention to reflective surfaces.
Wellmann’s piece in the 2021 New Museum Triennial — a hectic, 30-foot-long sort of Last Judgment called “Strobe” — had a wet kitchen sink in the middle that seemed ready to suck the whole scene down its drain by sheer force of realism. She paints her thin layers of oil on linen, a tightly woven fabric that affords finer detail than canvas. If her oils “dry dead,” she told me, she will glaze a painting to give it an overall wetness.
Some weeks after our visit Wellmann texted me: “You know what, I might have resolved it.” And she had. Back in the studio, several of her paintings, which she had formerly declared almost done, had changed drastically. She seems to alter her painted situations with the impulses of an abstract artist.
The ram panels, now titled “Greener Than Grass and Almost Dead,” were proudly propped. Wellmann was smiling. “The show needed something like an emblem,” she said. “A lot of the paintings have a sense of self-destruction, and I wanted this painting to take a symbol of masculinity, virility, war, and turn it in on itself to the point of collapse.”
The horizon was now a riverbank, and diagonal. It led your eye southwest. Wellmann had taken a belt sander to the clouds and grass, muddying them up into imitations of earth and water at night. The ram’s eye, once shut, was now open. It looked lifelike in its socket of flesh and white fur. Wellmann had dry-brushed gray down through the pupil in a striking recollection of glazed-over sight.
Something had clicked. “Before, the flatness was really troublesome,” Wellmann decided. “Now there’s an old feeling of movement from the paint underneath, and a new feeling of movement from the new paint on top.”
Art dealers and publicists like to rattle off old masters to add legitimacy to the contemporary painters on their rosters. But in Wellmann’s case, art history feels spoken with rather than just borrowed.
Her strip club diptych contains cleverly integrated examples of the medieval “Death and the Maiden” trope, in which skeletons grasp young women like lovers. There is a Dutch still-life clarity and overload of her scenery. Those particular memento moris don’t need any updating to feel as decadent or as threatening in the age of social media, Wellmann’s paintings seem to say.
The internet — “the only area of my life where I’m like an addict,” she said — has a way of making its own unconscious connections. Not unlike the connections that the eye makes before a representational painting. Wellmann examined the new, smooshed bed of grass she had given her ram, where a few flowers from its first iteration were still visible underneath the sanded surface, tying it together. There was a new sense of movement to it, she said, citing the grass in Botticelli’s allegorical painting “Spring.”
“Sometimes you only need to add one or two things,” Wellmann explained. “The brain does the rest of the work.”
Ambera Wellmann: Darkling
Sept. 5 to Oct. 25, Hauser & Wirth, 134 Wooster Street, Manhattan; 212- 542-5660, hauserwirth.com.
One Thousand Emotions
Sept. 5 to Oct. 25, Company Gallery, 365 Broome Street, Manhattan; 646-756-4547, companygallery.us.
The post Fixing a Problem Painting With Ambera Wellmann appeared first on New York Times.
