Anthony Ausgang

Anthony Ausgang (born 1959) is a contemporary lowbrow painter. He paints in a colorful, cartoony, surrealistic style influenced by Kustom Kulture and Tex Avery.

Biography

Anthony Ausgang was born in Trinidad and Tobago to a Dutch mother and Welsh father. The family moved to Houston Texas in the early 1960s, a particularly difficult time for an immigrant family to parse American culture. Nevertheless, Ausgang's father made brave attempts to assimilate by attending custom car shows and demolition derbies. Ausgang eventually discovered the artist Ed Roth and before long had a shoebox full of Rat Finks, a small plastic figurine of a noxious rodent that had somehow become the embodiment of hot rod and custom car culture. Ausgang's mother continued the European traditions by dragging her son to endless operas, symphonies and art museums. This combination of High Art and Low Art was to prove a fertile cultural mulch for Ausgang's artistic inclinations. He studied art from 1978 to 1980 at the University of Texas in Austin but soon succumbed to the myth of California and moved to Los Angeles where, after the birth of his daughter Lorraine, he began classes at the Otis Art Institute in 1981. Disappointed to find out that the curriculum there did not include target practice, admiring cars or watching surf films, Ausgang left in 1983 to start showing his artwork to any gallery that wouldn't throw him out ... and to a few that did.

After almost ten years of showing at galleries in Los Angeles and San Diego he was invited in 1992 to participate in a group show at the infamous Zero One Gallery, a combination of after hours nightclub, gallery and crashpad. At the Zero One Ausgang met Robert Williams, who had been one of the main forces at Roth Studios in the 1960s and at the time the most successful practitioner of the type of art that would later be called Lowbrow and/or "Pop Surrealism". As his reputation grew Ausgang's work was acquired by collectors including actor Nicolas Cage, musician Perry Farrell and the anarchist socialite Gisela Getty. At this time Ausgang began to make record and CD covers for Sympathy for the Record Industry and working as a consultant on early computer generated animation. In 1993 Ausgang was included in the Laguna Art Museum's seminal exhibit "Kustom Kulture" which investigated art influenced by gearhead car culture. In 2003 Ausgang's paintings could be seen in "Morning Wood", a primer of Post Graf art; in 2004 his work graced the pages of contemporary art survey "Pop Surrealism"' and in 2005 "Weirdo Deluxe" explained his art to the unenlightened. In 2006 Ausgang was included in the exhibition Power Pathos at the Station Museum in Houston, Texas along with Ron English, Clark Fox, and the musicians Gibby Haynes and Daniel Johnston.

Ausgang draws influence from as many outside channels as possible, preferring the toy contents of grocery store gumball machines over the latest exhibit at the Whitney Museum. Opinionated but informed, he is able to see the beauty in both a Rembrandt and a rat rod. This variety of interest has led him to design his artwork on the computer but complete it on the easel, the perfect combination of new technology and traditional media.

Books

* Anthony Ausgang (2007) "Vacation from Reality, The Art of Anthony Ausgang". ISBN-13: 978-0-9766325-0-4::This is an art monograph covering the previous two decades of his work. Ausgang's artwork covers a wide range of expression, from painting on smashed muscle cars to invading other people's paintings with his "toon existentialism" and subversive humor.

External links

* [http://www.ausgangart.com Anthony Ausgang's web site]
* [http://jonathanlevinegallery.com/?method=Artist.ArtistDetail&ArtistID=F23967A5-3048-28EB-92B2DC5398AD43E4&GalleryID=82C33C59-3048-28EB-92DB386C8C733405 Bio at Jonathan Levine Gallery]