T Introduces highlights the debut of a singular person, place or thing.
When the Canadian artist Ambera Wellmann painted “Strobe” (2021), a Surrealist beach landscape measuring 30 feet in length, she had just moved to New York, where she’d found representation with Company Gallery. Before that, she’d produced relatively small works, but now she was thinking big. “New York loves sensationalism in a way that’s kind of refreshing,” she says. “People like to make a splash.”
When the piece was included in the 2021 New Museum Triennial, it did just that. And while none of the paintings in her upcoming solo show — opening simultaneously next year in Manhattan at Company and Hauser & Wirth, which now jointly represent her — are quite so enormous, they also allude to the ocean and its degradation. “If the sea can no longer house anything,” asks Wellmann, “where does mythology live?”
Wellmann, 42, grew up surrounded by water in rural Nova Scotia, the second of three children in a working-class family. “I wanted to be an artist since I was very young, in the most clichéd way,” she says, though she didn’t attend art school until she was 25, eventually receiving an M.F.A. from the University of Guelph in Ontario.
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In July, she was working on paintings for the show in her Bushwick, Brooklyn, studio, where printouts of online images and news headlines were strewn across the floor. Her art deals with existential concerns as intimate as sex and as global as climate change, but it’s also funny and whimsical, incorporating everything from Instagram memes to tarot cards and depictions of cunnilingus. In one painting, a topless mermaid lounges on a couch, her beautiful, bored eyes glued to a laptop screen while a female mannequin head presides imperiously over the room from a side table. In another, a skeleton crouches next to a naked fisherman who has washed ashore with a shoal of fish. “You have to embrace how ridiculous the painting is,” she says.
Wellmann admits that she grapples with self-doubt, sometimes shifting gears midway through a painting. The best strategy, she now believes, is to think of each work not as distinct but as part of a larger whole. “I find that paintings are done when they generate the idea for the next painting,” she says, “so they’re inherently connected.”
