Ambera wellmann biography books
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Looking With What Eyes?
An Interview with Ambera Wellmann
August 2023Interviews
In her recent solo exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, Ambera Wellmann painted a body of work in which she took a number of her titles from If Not, Winter, Anne Carson’s translations of the fragmentary poems of Sappho, the Greek lyric poet who was born on the island of Lesbos about 620 BCE and whom Plato called the Tenth Muse. Suggestive and minimal lines like “For you beautiful ones my thought is not changeable,” “You Burn Me” and “To a Girl in a Garden” became points of departure for paintings that overow with bodies and incidents.
Wellmann went even further in naming the Turin exhibition “Antipoem,” a word picked from Carson’s introduction to the collection, where she writes that the missing words function as “a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write.” Wellmann says in the following interview that the book’s power comes a
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The idea of erasure as the final gesture in the process of un-becoming is crucial as it harnesses a state within the work that is pre-pictorial,[7] as Deleuze would say—the non-visible in the painting. According to Wellmann, it allows one to distinguish between time and narrative, through gesture as opposed to image, and erasure as opposed to the application of paint, where the gesture becomes an active and negating agent that transforms the work and the viewers’ experience.[8] When thinking about Ambera’s work, I like to think of this endeavor as monstrous plasticity—the time of minotaurs.
Though emancipatory temporalities and queer utopias are usually conceptualized through their orientation towards the future, Wellmann explores a speculative engagement not only with futurity but also with the past, reimagined for its potentiality for pleasure and excess. By engaging with art historical references, she modulates them according to her desires. It might be tempting to casuall
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Ambera Wellmann
Ambera Wellmann was born in 1982 in the port town of Lunenberg, Nova Scotia. She received her undergraduate degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and studied at Cooper Union in New York. In 2016, while pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Guelph in Ontario, she received the namn Plaskett Award in Painting, which allowed her to live and work in Berlin.
In 2017, Wellmann won the prestigious RBC Canadian Painting Competition for work that explored many of the themes and methods she continues to pursue today in paintings constructed from numerous layers of intricately worked wet oils, often depicting oklar human and animal forms, sometimes in extremis or entwined in states of ecstasy, figurative in only a tenuous sense. 'I am often just looking for an arrangement with the bodies that actually feels impossible,’ Wellmann says, 'in beställning to create a diagram for what kind of infinite possibilities the body can have.’