The Canadian artist Ambera Wellmann grew up in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, graduating from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax in 1990, and receiving her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Guelph in Ontario three years later. She now lives and works mainly in New York, though also has bases in Berlin in Germany and Mexico City. She first exhibited in Toronto in 2016, then in New York, Montreal and Brussels in 2018. Since then her work has been shown in Norway, Italy, Mexico, Ireland and Germany.

Wellmann’s earlier paintings were inspired by personal experiences of emotional and erotic encounters. Her more recent figurative works are largely compelled by a search to structure female desire pictorially. Aware that desire is almost always depicted from the point of view of the male gaze, Wellmann seeks to portray it from a female perspective in all its complexity, perversity and messiness. Her bodies forfeit their individuality, blurring, blending and dissolving into each other. Her very personal approach to the subject of desire, which is at once timely and timeless, makes her a unique, much-needed and eloquent voice in the history of erotic painting.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for introducing us to the work of this artist.