“Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting,” wrote William James in his masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experience, “still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.” The work of Ambera Wellmann seems to echo James’s point in our own times of ignoring and forgetting. In her painting People Loved and Unloved, Wellmann puts the chaos of our world into the middle of a dinner party, where a guest perversely turns to watch a nude and wounded pole dancer as if she were a mid-meal show. The woman suggests a figure from Francis Bacon, painted in his fast-shifting sfumato. There are Bosch-like skeletons at the table, too. Wellmann shows us that we are not essentially different from pre-modern people, and that despite our slick, technologically advanced society, we are subject to the same rules of annihilation that oppressed the medieval world. “Darkling” marks the artist’s debut exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, which features both old and new work. —Jimmy Lux Fox