AMBERA WELLMANN
b. 1982, CanadaAmbera Wellmann (born 1982, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia) is a Canadian painter whose layered oil paintings depict nebulous human and animal forms in states of transformation, dissolution, and ecstasy.
In January 2026, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York announced the acquisition of Wellmann’s painting Sacrum (2025) as part of its 2025 acquisitions, marking the artist’s first inclusion in the museum’s collection. This acquisition places Wellmann alongside a generation of emerging and mid-career artists whose work is reshaping the Guggenheim’s approach to contemporary figuration.
Early years
Ambera Wellmann was born in 1982 in the port town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. She received a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and studied at Cooper Union in New York. In 2016, while pursuing an MFA at the University of Guelph in Ontario, she received the Joseph Plaskett Award in Painting, which allowed her to live and work in Berlin. Wellmann subsequently lived and worked in Mexico City before settling in New York, where she is now based.
Ambera Wellmann Artworks
Ambera Wellmann’s paintings are constructed from numerous layers of intricately worked wet oils, often depicting forms that are figurative only in a tenuous sense. Her practice explores what she calls ‘painterly catachresis’—deliberately using images and pictorial representation incorrectly—manifesting through irrational space and indeterminate bodies, genders, and species without predetermined visual hierarchy.
Early work and wet-on-wet technique
Wellmann’s earlier paintings were inspired by personal experiences of emotional or erotic encounters, often showing horizontal domains of beds against amorphous bodies pushing against social binaries. Her approach involves building paintings through layers of wet oil, creating nebulous forms that are sometimes in extremis or entwined in states of ecstasy. ‘I am often just looking for an arrangement with the bodies that actually feels impossible,’ Wellmann has said, ‘in order to create a diagram for what kind of infinite possibilities the body can have’.
Art historical engagement and Berlin period
While living in Berlin, Wellmann became more deeply engaged with art history, with the influence of Goya, Bosch, Bruegel, Courbet, and Ingres, as well as Italian Renaissance and Netherlandish and Spanish Baroque masters, emerging more palpably in her paintings. In addition to historical precedents, she draws from sources as diverse as pornographic photography and video, screenshots from Instagram and other digital sources, and observational drawings made on the streets or in the subway.
Mexico City and erasure
Following her time in Berlin, Wellmann moved to Mexico City, where pronounced floral imagery gave way to darker tableaux in which ‘humans become animalized and animals humanized’. Skeletal forms began to appear as central figures, and erasure—often accomplished with an electric sander—became more integral to her finished work. For Wellmann, erasure slows the viewer’s eye and ‘involve[s] them in the time of the painting and its making’.
‘Strobe’ and the New Museum Triennial
In 2021, Wellmann’s tour de force work Strobe debuted as a centrepiece of the New Museum‘s Triennial exhibition Soft Water Hard Stone, curated by Margot Norton and Jamillah James. At thirty feet wide, this vast canvas depicts a landscape strewn with forms suggesting windblown limbs, clouds, detritus, and elongated figures of radically different sizes, as well as frolicking dogs and miniature girls smoking cigarettes, all anchored by a top-down view of a faucetless sink. Of the painting, she says, ‘you have to experience it in fragments, so it never reaches any kind of resolution’.
‘Antipoem’ and the Minotaur motif
In April 2023, Wellmann’s exhibition Antipoem opened at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. The new works took as a point of origin Anne Carson’s 2002 translations of Sappho, exploring the incomplete, highly scattered nature of Sappho’s surviving verse. Among the paintings was a series of large-scale works exploring themes of fear, power, and formlessness through a critical confrontation with the art historical motif of the Minotaur.
‘Darkling’ and ‘One Thousand Emotions’ (2025)
In September 2025, Wellmann debuted two new bodies of work simultaneously in New York: Darkling at Hauser & Wirth Wooster Street and One Thousand Emotions at Company Gallery. The concurrent exhibitions marked her debut with Hauser & Wirth and proposed a new model for gallery collaboration, with joint representation between the blue-chip gallery and her longtime gallery, Company. At Hauser & Wirth, Darkling presented monumental oil paintings exploring subjects from funerary rituals and strip clubs to compositions defying genre. At Company, One Thousand Emotions invoked the stubborn, unhinged, and disobedient spirits of historical figures persecuted as witches and heretics.
Select Awards and Accolades
- RBC Canadian Painting Competition, Winner, 2017
- Joseph Plaskett Award in Painting, 2016
- RBC Canadian Painting Competition, Finalist, 2016
To be kept up to date with news relating to Ambera Wellmann, follow her on Ocula.
Ambera Wellmann Exhibitions
Ambera Wellmann has been the subject of both solo exhibitions and group exhibitions at important institutions and galleries. Below is a selection of important exhibitions.
Select solo exhibitions
- Darkling, Hauser & Wirth, New York, 2025
- One Thousand Emotions, Company Gallery, New York, 2025
- Antipoem, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2023
- Exhibition, Stavanger Art Museum, Norway, 2023
- Exhibition, ICA Boston, Boston, 2022
- Exhibition, Palazzo Bollani, Venice, 2022
- Strobe (New Museum Triennial), New Museum, New York, 2021
- Exhibition, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, 2021
- Exhibition, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany, 2021
Select group exhibitions
- Soft Water Hard Stone (New Museum Triennial), New Museum, New York, 2021
- Exhibition, MAC Belfast, UK, 2021
- Exhibition, Pond Society, Shanghai, 2021
- Exhibition, The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, 2021
- Exhibition, MoCO, Montpellier, 2019
- Exhibition, MoMA Warsaw, Poland, 2019
- Exhibition, Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2019
- Exhibition, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2019
To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Ambera Wellmann, follow her on Ocula.
Collections
Ambera Wellmann’s works are held in the permanent collections of:
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
- National Gallery of Canada, Ontario
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway
- Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
- The Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus
- ICA Miami, Miami
- Mudam Luxembourg, Luxembourg City
- Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger
- X Museum, Beijing
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Website and Instagram
Ambera Wellmann’s website can be found at amberawellmann.com.
More Reading
Ambera Wellmann’s practice has been featured in leading publications including The New York Times, Cultured Magazine, CURA Magazine, and Mousse Magazine. Curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud has written that Wellmann ‘does not represent bodies, but the circumstances of their disappearance into the fluidity of the world’. You can follow Ambera Wellmann on Ocula to be updated when new articles are published.
Ambera Wellmann FAQs
Who is Ambera Wellmann?
Ambera Wellmann is a Canadian painter born in 1982 in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, who lives and works in New York. Her layered oil paintings depict nebulous human and animal forms exploring themes of transformation, intimacy, and the dissolution of boundaries between bodies, genders, and species.
Where can I see work by Ambera Wellmann?
Work by Ambera Wellmann can be seen at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Canada in Ontario, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, and ICA Miami. Her 2025 exhibitions Darkling at Hauser & Wirth and One Thousand Emotions at Company Gallery were on view in New York through October 2025.
Where does Ambera Wellmann live?
Ambera Wellmann lives and works in New York.
What is Ambera Wellmann’s painting technique?
Ambera Wellmann builds her paintings through numerous layers of intricately worked wet oils, a process that allows forms to blur and merge into one another. She also employs erasure as a key technique, often using an electric sander on dried paint to create textured, partially obscured surfaces that slow the viewer’s eye and ‘involve them in the time of the painting and its making’. This combination of layering and removal produces the nebulous, indeterminate quality that characterises her depictions of human and animal bodies.
What influences Ambera Wellmann’s paintings?
Ambera Wellmann draws on a wide range of art historical sources, including the work of Goya, Bosch, Bruegel, Courbet, and Ingres, as well as Italian Renaissance and Netherlandish and Spanish Baroque masters. Alongside these historical references, she incorporates imagery from contemporary digital culture, including pornographic photography and video, Instagram screenshots, and observational drawings made on the streets or subway. Her work also engages with feminist and literary sources, notably Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho, which informed her 2023 exhibition Antipoem.
What do Ambera Wellmann’s paintings mean?
Ambera Wellmann’s paintings explore themes of intimacy, transformation, and the dissolution of boundaries between bodies, genders, and species. She describes her approach as ‘painterly catachresis’—deliberately using images incorrectly to create irrational pictorial space and indeterminate forms without visual hierarchy. Rather than providing answers, Wellmann aims for her paintings to end with questions: ‘A painting should end with a question; it helps lead you to the next one’.
How is Ambera Wellmann’s name pronounced?
Ambera Wellmann’s name is pronounced ‘am-BEAR-ah WELL-mahn’, with the stress on the second syllable of ‘Ambera’ and a straightforward pronunciation of ‘Wellmann’.
Where can I buy Ambera Wellmann’s work?
Ambera Wellmann is jointly represented by Hauser & Wirth and Company Gallery. You can explore sites like Ocula to find out which Ocula galleries represent the artist and enquire directly about buying art by Ambera Wellmann.
Ocula | 2026
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