‘UnTurning’ was the title of Ambera Wellmann’s first institutional European show, held at the Metropolitan Arts Centre in Belfast, Ireland, in the autumn of 2021. The title captures the sense of disorientation and recalibration of intimacy presented by her nested, collage-like painting technique that portrays twisted and abstracted human bodies. In her universe, desire is sometimes tender, entirely straightforward and unambiguous, and at others strange, unsettling and violent. She manages to tap into and convey the fundamentally unwieldy, multidimensional, ultimately incomprehensible quality of this human experience, and while the primary subject is the body, space also plays a prominent role, created by and in between the bodies.

Wellmann approaches her paintings with what she calls ‘painterly catachresis’, which she describes as a process to deliberately use a word, image, or pictorial representation in a way that is not ‘correct’. This manifests through irrational pictorial space and the depiction of an indeterminate number of bodies, genders and species, all without any predetermined visual hierarchy.

Ambera Wellmann’s works encourage an experience of uncertain intimacy. The figures commingle into numberless, genderless corporealities, resisting the performative power dynamics present in the western canon of figuration from which she gleans. She explores the potential of a whole array of art-historical syntaxes that span medieval art, romanticism and surrealism, allowing her viewers to negotiate them anew, embracing the unpredictable possibilities of a personal gaze, and refusing a conventional heteronormative one. Embracing chance, error and vulnerability, Wellmann works in a distinctly feminist and queered perspective.