Anthony Ausgang

Anthony Ausgang is one of the original artists of the second wave of Low Brow Art that began in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. Inspired by the first wave Kustom Kulture Art of 1960s artists Ed Roth, Robert Williams and Von Dutch, artists like Ausgang, Pizz and Coop took Hot Rod Art as their starting point and mixed it up with the new Post Punk graphic vocabulary to create a new style of painting that would later be called Low Brow Art. Since then a third wave of No Brow Art has emerged in the paintings of artists like Shag, Mark Ryden and Camile Rose Garcia.
Anthony Ausgang was born on May 22, 1959 in Point-A-Pierre, Trinidad and Tobago in the British West Indies. His father, Peter Thompson, was Welsh and worked as a chemical engineer for Trinidad Leaseholders while his mother, Ann Thompson, kept everything together on the domestic front raising Anthony and his brother Nicholas. In 1961 the family moved to Houston Texas because Peter had been chosen to join the new Computer Research Department at Texaco. Ausgang’s father made brave attempts to assimilate by taking the family to custom car shows, demolition derbies and rodeos while Ann insisted on keeping the European traditions alive by attending symphonies and opera performances. This combination of High Art and Low Culture was to prove fertile cultural mulch for Ausgang’s artistic inclinations and he spent a short stint studying art at The University Of Texas in Austin in the late 1970s. The Austin scene then was made up of a peculiar mix of vanishing hippies and emerging punks who, due to the insular nature of the place, would take acid together and have large scale “situations” like the famed Eeyore’s Birthday parties. Eventually Ausgang succumbed to the myth of California and moved to Los Angeles where, shortly after the birth of his daughter Lorraine, he began classes at The Otis Art Institute. Disappointed to find out that the curriculum there didn’t include target practice, admiring cars or watching surf films, Ausgang pursued his career as a painter and musician in the band Gutbucket, meanwhile working as an “art mule” hanging art in Beverly Hills mansions. His first break came at the Zero One Gallery when his art dealer traded a painting for a bag of cheap Mexican weed. Since there was nowhere to go but up, Ausgang began to sell to collectors like Nicolas Cage and showing in provincial museums and New York galleries. As Low Brow Art became more popular, books began to be published on the subject and in 1993 Ausgang was included in the catalogue for the Laguna Beach 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 2008, Ausgang’s automobile inspired paintings were included in Les Baranay’s Carnivora. Ausgang’s work can also be seen in Marcus Roger’s 2005 documentary “The Lowdown on Lowbrow”, Gregg Gibb’s 2007 film “The Treasure’s of Long Gone John” and Justin Giarla’s new movie “New Brow: The Rise of Underground Art” from 2009.
Ausgang‘s early paintings are “reality based” and depict environments and characters based on natural observation. Later “realist” works include the “Improved Art” series where found paintings are embellished with Ausgang characters engaged in behavior dictated by the pre-existing location set in the painting. Currently Ausgang is exploring the line between abstract and representational art and his hopped up, morphed up feline characters border on the edge of being unrecognizable.

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