“All my structures for desire consisted of paintings that weren’t made for me, and never anticipated me as a viewer.”
—Ambera WellmannIn Ambera Wellmann’s Ritz, 2018, amorphous, ambiguously gendered bodies entangle in an intimate, almost orgiastic setting. The interplay of pale pink flesh complements the vibrant pinks of Wellmann’s bed and background, evoking associations of both a playful, girlhood innocence and searing adult lust. The artist’s figures possess a liquid quality, perpetually in states of becoming and undoing, as boundaries soften, and bodies seamlessly intermingle. Her nudes are incomplete and interlocking, with hazy, black-shadowed outlines that make it difficult—even undesirable—to parse out where one body ends, and another begins. This anatomical morph and blend is meant to seem fantastic, Wellmann says; her work “actually feels impossible, in order to create a diagram for what kind of infinite possibilities the body can have."ⁱ

 

Wellmann begins each painting with sketches of instances where body parts touch or bodies make contact. She seeks “that erotically-charged moment, [which] becomes the central axis from which the rest of the painting develops.”ⁱⁱ From there, she works with wet oils and pastels that allow her to stream and blend pigment across the canvas, allowing the painting to respond to itself rather than to a linear addition of elements. The colors she employs, coupled with a light brushwork technique that blurs lines, not only achieve an elastic luminosity, but also create the effect of liquid skin.

 

The emotive eroticism of Ritz takes inspiration from the 18^th and 19^th century Romantic canon, whose artists, “in the midst of revolution,” Wellman explained, “conceptualized violent spectacle as an engine of self-understanding and renewal.”ⁱⁱⁱ In Ritz, Wellmann navigates this sentiment through a feminist lens. She evokes the visual motifs and dynamism of Romantic, Rococo, and even proto-Modernist masterpieces—the square, platform bed and twisting bodies of Ritz recall the composition of Eugène Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, Musée du Louvre, Paris, for instance, while her use of black shadows evokes Édouard Manet’s provocative Olympia, 1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Her peach-pink skin tones and cherry-red nipples are as heightened and sensual as the nudes of Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

“I am searching for ways to pictorially structure female desire, an endeavor that almost always coincides with an internalized male gaze—so there is rarely a singular sense of a body or self in the paintings. There is distortion, mirroring and, as much as the bodies appear lost in erotic acts, there is an awareness that they perform for the viewer as well.”
—Ambera WellmannWellmann embraces the uncanny and erotic characteristics embedded in historical representations of women, but subverts the male artist’s hegemonic gaze by deliberately challenging the traditional portrayal of desire as an individualized experience. Instead, as in Ritz, she orchestrates an amalgamation of multiple bodies, creating a collective sensation of sensuality that cannot be contained within one gaze, or one moment in time. This intentional departure from the singular male gaze disrupts traditional expectations, inviting viewers to witness an interconnected dance of lust and liberated sensuality. 

 

Collector’s Digest

• Wellmann’s work is represented in a number of public collections, including The Columbus Museum of Art; ICA Miami; MFA Boston; and X Museum, Beijing. 

• Recent solo exhibitions include Antipoem, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Apr.-Oct. 2023; UnTurning, The MAC, Belfast, 2021; and Ambera Wellmann, Pond Society, Shanghai, China, 2021.  

 

 

ⁱ  Coco Romack, “Liquid skin, blurred lines: how Ambera Wellmann creates startlingly intimate scenes,” Art Basel, Dec. 4, 2021, online.

ⁱⁱ Ambera Wellman, quoted in Louise Benson, “Ambera Wellmann Pushes Sensuality to Its Limit and Beyond,” Elephant, Jan. 5, 2019, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ  Ibid.