Ambera Wellmann is preparing for two concurrent New York exhibitions opening on September 5, one at Company gallery and her debut at Hauser & Wirth's Wooster Street space. The shows mark a new joint representation model where the artist works with both a smaller, queer-focused gallery and a mega-gallery simultaneously. Wellmann's hallucinatory, collage-like paintings feature bodies, sex vignettes, and semi-mythic imagery, though she recently considered moving away from figuration due to frustrations with the "queer figuration" trend and its market co-optation.
This dual-gallery arrangement proposes an alternative to the traditional gallery system, allowing artists to benefit from the resources of a major institution like Hauser & Wirth while maintaining the creative freedom and intimacy of a smaller space like Company. Wellmann's critical reflection on figuration and queer identity in painting speaks to broader debates in the contemporary art world about authenticity, market trends, and the politics of representation. The exhibitions also highlight a growing model of artist representation that prioritizes collaboration over competition between galleries of different scales.