Ambera Wellmann

Ambera Wellmann was born in 1982 in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, a small port town on Canada's Atlantic coast. She earned a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in 2011, including an exchange semester at Cooper Union in New York in 2010, and completed an MFA at the University of Guelph in Ontario in 2016. While at Guelph she received the Joseph Plaskett Award, and in 2017 she won the RBC Canadian Painting Competition.

Her paintings, worked in oil on linen, canvas, wood, and occasionally pastel, dissolve and recombine bodies into surreal, collage-like compositions, treating figuration as something fluid rather than fixed. From 2018 to 2023 she was represented by Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin, a relationship that placed her work in institutions including the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and the Pond Society in Shanghai. Company Gallery in New York launched its own representation of her in 2020 with the solo exhibition Nosegay Tornado, and in December 2023 Hauser & Wirth announced that it would jointly represent her alongside Company Gallery, an arrangement that continues as of this writing. She has shown in the 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019), at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2019), and at the New Museum in New York (2021), among other institutional venues. She currently divides her time between Berlin, Mexico City, and New York.

Critical attention to Wellmann has centered on how her paintings treat the body as unstable rather than fixed, dissolving and recombining figures into hybrid, collage-like forms. That reading runs through the institutional response to her work, from her inclusion in the 16th Istanbul Biennial to solo presentations at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, where her 2023 exhibition Antipoem was framed around similarly dissolving, hybrid figures. The rapid sequence of gallery representation, first Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, then Company Gallery, and now a joint arrangement with Hauser & Wirth, has itself become part of the critical narrative around her, read as a sign of an artist whose institutional and commercial support has escalated quickly relative to her auction history.

Wellmann's current auction high on record is This Will Always be Beneath Us, reported at USD 189,000 at Phillips in New York in May 2022, though the exact sale day is not published in available records. Her next-highest recorded result is Ritz, a 2018 oil on linen that sold for USD 133,350 at Phillips' 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York on 14 November 2023, well above its USD 40,000 to 60,000 estimate. Other recorded auction results at Phillips, Sotheby's, and Christie's for her work have generally ranged from the high USD 20,000s to just over USD 130,000, reflecting a market still built on a small number of public sales.

Wellmann's market is defined by strong institutional backing set against a short and still-developing auction record. There is no catalogue raisonne for her work, so provenance and verification run through her representing galleries rather than an independent scholarly authority. Because so few of her works have come to auction, individual results, including her currently documented auction high for This Will Always be Beneath Us, should be read as data points from a thin sample rather than as evidence of a stable price trend, and collectors should expect volatility until a longer sale history accumulates.