Jai Chuhan: Claiming Space
Lo Brutto Stahl, Paris, FR
Ambera Wellmann: Darkling—One Thousand Emotions
Hauser & Wirth—Company Gallery, New York, US
Opening in tandem across two distinct New York venues, Ambera Wellmann’s twin exhibitions—Darkling at Hauser & Wirth and One Thousand Emotions at Company Gallery—offer parallel yet sharply divergent experiences of her ongoing exploration into the instability of form, selfhood, and historical memory. The decision to split the presentation of this new body of works across two locations is not only a strategic decision to make the most buzz out of joint partnership representation, with two spaces having two different faces. The polished vastness of Hauser & Wirth’s Wooster Street gallery hosts a suite of large-scale, meticulously composed paintings that uncoil in meditative procession. Meanwhile, Company Gallery stages a more insurgent, experimental installation, where drawing, gesture, and allegory unravel across walls like incantation.
At Hauser & Wirth, Darkling gathers a new body of monumental paintings that feel both grand and intimate. The exhibition moves like a slow procession: deliberate, charged, cloaked in ambiguity. Time in these works is unsettled, stretched taut between catastrophe and ritual. Figures dissolve into one another; limbs become tails, mouths open into wounds, bodies contort into ambiguous formations that resist clear resolution. The canvases are rendered with virtuosic control, but what they depict is anything but stable. Space bends, perspective falters. An Ensorian world tilts sideways. Even the palette—lush, moody, at times lurid—participates in this sense of unease. One could argue that these are somewhat apocalyptic paintings in the narrative sense; yet, it seems to me that they rather absorb the pressure of the present and allow it to warp their internal logic. There are echoes of Bosch and Courbet, of tarot and fairytale, citations that are folded into the paint like pigment, contributing to a visual language that is at once learned and instinctive. But Wellmann is not ready to let her work die in the canon of art just yet, which takes us to Elizabeth Street.
One Thousand Emotions at Company Gallery shows a different side of the same artist—an immediacy and rawness that does not allow what one could describe as institutional confinement—animated by a defiant energy. Wellmann invokes the figures history tried to erase: witches, heretics, gender nonconformists, and all those who refused the role assigned to them. Death reappears, but not as an endpoint. Instead, it functions as an emissary and disruptor, a reminder that nothing remains fixed. Charcoal drawings streak across the walls like traces of revolt. In this context, skeletons become less anatomical than political—symbols of disorder, of ecstatic refusal, of the body untethered from doctrine. In place of monumental oil paintings, this show leans into the fragmentary and the gestural. The work pulses with narrative, but never quite settles into story. Instead, it circles, doubles back, contradicts itself. One image offers a ritual in flame; another, a solemn grief; another still, a flash of humor, an irreverent mask, a glint of mischief behind the veil—works that speak in their own register.
For more information, please consult Hauser & Wirth and Company Gallery.
Last Updated on September 10, 2025
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
Alejandro Javaloyas: Un cuchillo que no corta
Galeria Reus, Palma, ES
Cecily Brown: Picture Making
Serptine South, London, UK
