On April 4, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo opens Antipoem, the first solo exhibition in Italy by Ambera Wellmann (1982, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia). Together with a small selection of existing works, Antipoem presents a cycle of new paintings specifically created by the artist for this occasion.

The show’s title takes its name from Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho’s archaic Greek poetry, whose fragmented remnants and missing passages create what Carson describes as a kind of Antipoem, a space where the visual intervenes in the absence of language.

Among the new paintings created for this presentation are a series of large-scale Minotaurs. Wellmann’s works investigate fear, power and formlessness through a critical confrontation with the art-historical motif of the Minotaur. Set amidst nocturnal landscapes, Wellmann’s figures obscure and disintegrate in their environments, where darkness functions as both a metaphor for vulnerability, and a limitless queered atmosphere in which the boundaries of the body can disappear.