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Darkling: Ambera Wellmann’s Alchemy of Grief, Pleasure, and Form

Darkling: Ambera Wellmann’s Alchemy of Grief, Pleasure, and Form August 6, 2025Art Events, New YorkOff

Ambera Wellmann — Darkling

Words by Shari | Editor-in-Chief, What We Adore

The air in Darkling is heavy, but not with silence — it’s thick with the strange electricity that gathers before a storm. Ambera Wellmann’s latest paintings arrive like weather systems, their skies roiling, their light bending, their horizons tilting at impossible angles.

Here, bodies are unreliable narrators. A hand stretches until it becomes a fishtail, an ear drifts toward becoming a mouth, limbs fuse without permission. Edges dissolve, and with them the comfort of reality as we think we know it. It’s not distortion for its own sake — it’s the natural language of a world where the self is in constant flux, where the line between one body and another is more suggestion than fact.

Wellmann works in layers that feel geological. Swift, urgent marks lie against passages of painstaking precision; realism collapses into something dream-drunk and unmoored. Her paintings hold the actual and the possible in the same frame — one to anchor you, the other to let you slip sideways into her unstable gravity.

In one scene, a snowy funeral for a pigeon unfolds under the watch of a Death Knight borrowed from tarot and a masked congregation worthy of Ensor. In another, the ocean leans at an angle that should be impossible, sunsets multiply, and the sky tilts until you’re not sure where you’re standing. The logic is fluid, but the emotional truth is precise: desire, grief, metamorphosis, appetite.

Death is everywhere, but it refuses to be generalized. These works understand that not all endings are grieved equally — that loss is political, intimate, and asymmetrical. And yet there’s wit threaded through the solemnity: a half-smile in the shadows, a gesture that feels almost like a dare.

The artist appears, briefly, twice — self-portraits disguised as passing glances rather than declarations. They are less about presence than about the act of vanishing: a black velvet mask in place of a face, a gesture of retreat that somehow reveals more than it hides.

Wellmann’s Darkling is not an exhibition you simply look at — it’s one you metabolize. Each canvas is a spell, each composition a charm against collapse. Her command of light and color is as seductive as it is unsettling, a reminder that beauty can be its own form of sorcery.

Amber Wellmann — Darkling
Hauser & Wirth, Wooster Street, New York
September 5 – October 25, 2025
www.hauserwirth.com

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