Hauser & Wirth and Company Gallery to Host a Solo Presentation of New Works by Ambera Wellmann at Frieze LA

Stand D11, 20 – 23 February 2025

Santa Monica Airport
For this year’s Frieze Los Angeles, Hauser & Wirth and Company Gallery will host a solo  presentation of new works by Ambera Wellmann. Wellmann has attracted international attention for paintings  that recall the achievements of Renaissance and Baroque masters, with gorgeously complex compositions in  which unanchored figures and disembodied faces appear, merge and dissolve in richly rendered landscapes of  an imagined future. Her art constitutes a visual paean to metamorphosis, vulnerability and collectivity. On the  heels of Wellmann’s fall 2024 presentation at the 15th Gwangju Biennial, and as a prelude to her major two-venue  New York solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth and Company Gallery in fall 2025, the upcoming Frieze LA stand has  been organized under the aegis of the two galleries’ joint representation of the artist as part of Hauser & Wirth’s  Collective Impact model.

At the fair, Wellmann will debut four large paintings that reflect her engagement with the global environmental  crisis and ideas related to self-destruction, survival and transformation. These new canvases take inspiration  from historical masterworks that eschew conventional figuration in favor of alternative motifs to suggest human  presence. Through a process Wellmann has referred to as ‘visual catachresis,’ previously developed but  unfinished compositions have been reworked and painted over, rendering new assemblages of forms and images  in exquisite, ineffable configurations.

This process lends an air of the uncanny to ‘Noise of Oblation’ (2024), which harkens to historical still life painting  via its rendering of a large bird splayed on the canvas under the glare of a fire red sun. Wellmann here uses  conceits of genre painting to wrestle with the contemporary phenomenon of birds and other sea animals fatally  injesting debris that has collected in the ocean currents, known as gyres, which form floating islands of garbage.  Jewel-like detritus such as rotting fruit and vegetables, kitchen utensils, discarded glass bottles, and porcelain  animal figurines at once recall the momento mori of Baroque paintings and the scourge of modern human  destructiveness.

Images of the Anthropocene are conjured in both ‘Shoal Spectrum’ (2024), and ‘Ferox’ (2024). In the former,  Wellmann nods to the vital fishing industry of her native Nova Scotia through an imagined beach scene where  remnants of marine life intertwine with human remains. ‘Earth’s Diurnal Course’ (2024) posits both intimacy and  the infinite in its depiction of a celestial landscape populated with pairs of North American mammals – a new  narrative of Noah’s Ark or the prescient future population of planetary space.