ART CITIES:N.York-Vaughn Spann
Just after graduating from Yale School of Art in 2018, Vaughn Spann has had a sold-out solo show at Half Gallery in New York as well as exhibitions at Almine Rech in London, Night Gallery in Los Angeles, and Takashi Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo. His worm defies easy categorization with a unique practice that swings between figurative painting and mixed-media abstraction.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Almine Rech Gallery Archive
In his new solo exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery in New York Vaughn Spann presents a selection of new abstract and figurative paintings. For the showing both abstract and figurative work at the same time the artist says “My practice is a bit conceptual, and it oscillates between figuration and abstraction, because I’m interested in these stylistic separations and distinct breaks. As artists, we’re human. We have complicated ideas about everything. And I feel it would be a disservice to limit those ideas to one framework. I feel it’s such an unfortunate position for artists to be in, being determined by external factors. So I’m really challenging a way of making work that tries to embody all the things that I am, the people I encounter, the places I’ve gone, the things I’ve touched. All the things that actualize who I am as a maker, an artist, and a person”. These days, everyone knows that language is a very slippery thing. That’s what happens when you try to express an infinity of ideas with a limited set of symbols. On one level, Vaughn Spann’s art explores much of the same territory, no more so than in his current exhibition, “The Heat Lets us Know We’re Alive. Beach Side” (2019), featuring a woman clad in a swimsuit on a sandy shore implies the heat of the sun, the heat of passion, the heat of politics (her swimsuit is decorated in the Pan-African colors), the heat of the living body, and ultimately the heat that sustains life. “Cosmic Symbiote (Marked Man)” (2019) is in many ways its opposite, part of a series of works that developed during a period in which the artist was frequently stopped and searched. It might imply the heat of injustice, the heat of oppression (to reference Martin Luther King, and numerous of Spann’s previous works, such as the diptych “Lost in the cosmos of black bodies (we love you, we will always remember you)” (2019) or the sculpture “Who shall be held accountable?” (2019), as much as it implies alien status and, through its colour palette, the sense of being frozen out, through its graphic imagery a once-popular sci-fi series, and in social terms an influential American Muslim minister and social-rights activist. The options, for a viewer, remain multiple. The truths are many. They may even contradict each other. Which might relate in turn to the artist’s interest in polycephaly. That swimsuit-wearing woman has two heads, after all, as does the male in a green tracksuit sitting next to some rabbits and a woman caressing Dalmatians in others of the works on show.
Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 39 East 78th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, Duration: 15/1-22/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.alminerech.com
