Ambera Wellmann’s work emerges from an engagement with a diverse range of nineteenth-century figuration from the Western canon. She is interested in artists who conceptualized modes of realism as an engine of self-understanding and renewal during periods of rapid social and technological transformation. Exploring this tradition from a feminist perspective, her work embodies the experience of violence and eroticism that underlies realism, and critically reflects upon how those sensations are rationalized as representations of women. The translucent clay bodies that populate her paintings provide both a layered visual archaeology and a sense of continuity that engages a critical dialogue around figuration’s role in the production of gendered subjects and viewers. Through marks that seduce and simultaneously confess the procedures of their seduction, her paintings aspire to a sense of vulnerability over knowledge, and feeling over explanation.

Born in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Ambera Wellmann received a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in 2011, and most recently, her MFA in 2016 from the University of Guelph in Ontario. Her work has been purchased by private and public collectors across Canada. Her work has previously been shown during solo exhibitions at Dupont Projects, TrépanierBaer Gallery, Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran and Page and Strange Galleries in Canada, as well as Suzanne Biederberg Gallery in Amsterdam.  In 2016, she was a finalist in the 18th Annual Canadian RBC Painting Competition and also received the Joseph Plaskett Foundation Award. She was recently awarded the 19th Annual Canadian RBC Painting Competition.

EDUCATION

2016
MFA, University of Guelph, Guelph (Canada)

2011
BFA, Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University, Halifax (Canada)

2010
Cooper Union School of Art, New York (USA)