Vaughn Spann’s radically divergent painting practice embraces duality. His canvases range from impastoed mixed-media abstractions to surreal portraiture that echoes the two halves of his output: Spann’s figures (as seen on his 2019 canvases Beach Side and Parisian Girls) often have two heads. Such ingenuity garnered the Florida-born, Newark-based artist quick attention after he earned his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2018. He has since enjoyed solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Brussels, and Tokyo, among other cities. His work has been acquired by institutions including the Peréz Art Museum Miami, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Rubell Family Collection. In both his abstractions—with their formal emphasis on line, color, and shape—and his uncanny figurations, Spann considers identity, memory, time, racial disparities in the United States, and his own personal history.