The Brooklyn Rail

Crowds massing, restive and avid—right, left, moral or murderous, young male voices rising in song—beer gardens, cafes, drinking in companionable pleasure at the end of a workday, the dark, an inclusive environment. Think of Nicole Eisenman’s Beer Garden at Night (2007), a crowd and the yeasty scent of beer almost visible, illuminated by orbs of light strung across the painting. People drinking, talking, leaning in, the faces almost nameable, and death and a woman embrace in a dance. Think of Jörg Immendorff’s “Cafe Deutschland” series. The paintings’ tilt to the canvases’ foreground reads as urgent, speaks of disorder. Now look at Ambera Wellmann’s People Loved and Unloved (2025), a diptych on linen depicting a strip club, its size a space in itself. This work and six other substantial paintings make up an exhibition titled Darkling, now on view at Hauser & Wirth on Wooster Street. In conjunction with this exhibition is another selection of Wellmann’s work, One Thousand Emotions, at Company on Elizabeth Street. Beer gardens, cafes and strip clubs offer similar settings: night communities gathered together in whatever solace darkness and the company of others offers.

In Wellmann’s earliest paintings, this wasn’t the case. Single subjects or objects, often porcelain figurines, appeared against a dark ground, their compellingly rendered surfaces impermeable. Glossy and brittle, they sealed the object’s unavailability. Single figures became pairs in a painting like Fantasy Suite (2018), where, legs lifted and open, a pink-skinned, ample-breasted figure is being loved by a zebra. While the loving is implied, both parties are porcelain and remain distant. An animal-human metamorphosis slips into view as lines between species, the shapes of appendages, and whole corporeal transformations shift—boundaries are motile. The bed as a place of sensual experience is increasingly the ground on which the paintings’ action takes place. With Unturning (2019), a collaged oil painting, there is a dramatic shift, both in scale and presentation. Multiple indeterminate figures, limbs, and heads are arrayed on Baconesque islands of massed color. Although some object referents from earlier works remain, the work is new. The works included in the two current exhibitions take this earlier trajectory as their point of departure.

People Loved and Unloved sets the tone and temperature of Wellmann’s work at Hauser & Wirth. When everything else falls apart, poetry holds, and I go to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” (1851), where he speaks to his lover about the state of the world. He lists its deficiencies and absences: “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; / And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.” While only the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth is titled Darkling, both exhibitions serve as mirror and barometer for our overheated and apocalyptic time. There seems no exit, no balm. Everything is indeterminate and sliding; the paintings reflect this in their fluid edges, one image bleeding and melting into the next. Wellmann’s repertory cast is there in People Loved and Unloved, a vivid signal painting. Here we find a sortie between death and the maiden; a hand with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s draped and flaccid fingers; fish in an abundance that speaks of fecundity, nourishment, or rot; lavish tables; heat; flames; flares of light; some spectral heads like those of Edvard Munch; a woman folded at the waist exposing her anus—as in Banshee (2025), at Company; an odalisque; and flowers in a glass vase. It goes on, and always death is present, the persistent, uninvited guest. A rich, dense carmine colour, this diptych is divided again by the vertical pole on which a stripper turns. Wellmann has always been all eyes and has filled her visual memory with a dense awareness of art history.

Death Masks Eternity (2025) is a funeral set in a snowy landscape. Wellmann invites James Ensor and his masked assembly, Jan Brueghel the Elder’s hunting dogs and a felled horse birthing a man’s head. The snowy ground is painted rough and clotted; the blue sky above is smooth and serene, in the way Wellmann often varies her application of paint. And death, suited in armour, sits astride a porcelain horse whose hindquarters are absent. For no reason other than the world is cruel and chaos is ascendant, a ram lies broken in Greener Than Grass and Almost Dead (2025), its twisted body on the ground. Its horn curls and the point has pierced the jaw just above the throat. Some blood shows where it has entered. The horizontal bar at the top of the canvas is midnight blue, rich and oily ink, like gasoline on water. On its surface float lily pads of orange light.

Should Wellmann’s interest in death and devolution not have been clear, the work in One Thousand Emotions at Company makes this parade of despair unmistakeable. The long narrow gallery space leads the viewer in; the horse in profile, led by two hooded figures, their genitals exposed, carrying aloft masks on staves, lead you out—if there is an “out” in this unavoidable place. The painting that lends its name to the exhibition, One Thousand Emotions (2025), shows three prominent figures: a marble-pale odalisque whose absent head has melted into the dog against which she rests, a seated nude in deep warm red who could have been sent by Paul Gauguin, and the liveliest among them, an articulated skeleton straddling the thin branches of an adjacent tree. Behind this trio are active clouds or a pond, and above, a dark sky filled with small comets of light. Consistent with our time, none of the figures connect. The painting is mounted on a wall upon which Wellmann has painted a silhouette of an odalisque, one arm raised behind her head in invitation—the head here, a skull. The figure lays on a hospital gurney, not a typical site of pleasure. Five works hang here, layering over or supported by the black figures and objects in Wellmann’s murals: skulls, an eclipsed black sun, a proud horse whose second hind leg is clothed in jeans and a sneaker. A tail, no mane but a large skull where the head would be. Like an ossuary, more drawn skulls cluster at floor height.

On entering Company’s gallery you see a figure which could be familiar from Hieronymus Bosch—a crouched form, buttocks, leg, foot, and the dark feathered head of a crow. Its flat foot rests where the wall touches the floor. Diagonally opposite this bird-man-foot is a painting of a pairing which may not be voluntary. A well-groomed standard poodle, its head lifted, its jaws open in a soundless howl is mounted by a large humpy-shaped dog of unidentifiable breed, tightly grasping the much smaller poodle. The dog on top wears a mask which is almost human—pointy nose and a single eye which, on close inspection, has a modelled socket; the pupil at its center is a black pushpin.

Wellmann’s two exhibitions are prodigious, their skill beyond question. They are weighty and correct for our time—a silent scream. But is it “let me in” or “let me out”?