How the past sticks to us with such obstinacy! A dark age befell us once and never lifted, at least never for long. The first evil visionaries who enclosed the commons - the land and its fruits shared by a village - were the same who decided that the women doing something about it—righteous rioting against greed and hunger—were to also be enclosed: themselves, their bodies, their community, their productivity, and their children were to also become their visionary property.

“The destructive force of such uncooperative women was feared,” as Ulinka Rublack wrote, and so was anyone enacting any resistance to brutally enforced sexual hierarchies: they were persecuted as heretics,witches, sodomites. Here, in a pictorial whirlpool stirred out of the image-conjuring sorcery of painting and drawings Ambera Wellmann seeks to invoke their stubborn, unhinged, and disobedient spirits.

It is probably not a coincidence that death resurges in this show as a symbol of trickery, dereliction, and hope. It is the little thing we have in common with those who shape our overdetermined lives as if wrung tissue paper—and of course they pool their endless resources into the pitiful secular chicanery of science to permanently avoid it.

Skeletons abound as a reminder of disorder, anger, inevitable change: the need to loosen one’s tethers to our over-disciplined bodies. As tarot would have it, the skeleton represents the end of an illusion, the 12th arcanum insists: “I make destruction a process of extreme splendor”. She’s an emissary for transformation. And do we need it! Death peeks over the horizon at the gaping defiance that opens this show, or sits awkwardly in the corner of a tentative nude scene. Elsewhere her essence is summoned in a blood-red ritual of pyromancy, the magic of finding the future, or the messages from whom death already took dancing within fire flames. Her semblance haunts the space in allegories, scrawled in sprawling charcoal drawings across the gallery’s walls.

Pascal, the Catholic scientist and mathematician from the 17th century, wondered, and quickly realized: “Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis.” We are but one-day guests in the hotel of life. Perhaps it is that arbitrariness, that pull of impermanence, that allows us to sit, nakedly and auspiciously, at the very edge of disaster, our sight hovering over the eye of the hurricane, accompanied only by an enduring nature that has seen it all.

- Gaby Cepeda

About the exhibitions

Opening 5 September, Ambera Wellmann debuts two new bodies of work simultaneously in New York — in the exhibition titled Darkling at Hauser & Wirth Wooster Street and in this presentation at Company, marking her second solo presentation with Company and first with Hauser & Wirth. Both exhibitions will be on view through 25 October 2025.

An opening reception will be held on 5 September from 5–8PM.