Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Anthony Ausgang’s Trippy Cats Get Trippier in “Catascopes”

Los Angeles based artist Anthony Ausgang, coined a "godfather of Lowbrow," has made a career of depicting his own struggles in his kaleidoscopic cat paintings. Colorful and intensely surreal, his playful images portraying cartoon cats in unusual scenarios are loosely inspired by reality. Ausgang makes no secret of his experimentation with psychedelics, and these experiences have carved their way into his hallucinatory visions and bright palette. In his upcoming solo exhibition "Catascopes", opening May 30th at Copro Gallery, Ausgang's trippy paintings of cats get even trippier.

Los Angeles based artist Anthony Ausgang, coined a “godfather of Lowbrow,” has made a career of depicting his own struggles in his kaleidoscopic cat paintings. Colorful and intensely surreal, his playful images portraying cartoon cats in unusual scenarios are loosely inspired by reality. Ausgang makes no secret of his experimentation with psychedelics, and these experiences have carved their way into his hallucinatory visions and bright palette. In his upcoming solo exhibition “Catascopes”, opening May 30th at Copro Gallery, Ausgang’s trippy paintings of cats get even trippier. Throughout the course of the series, they become completely detached from their already abstract environment. Ausgang plays with the concept of dissolving an image almost beyond recognition, without compromising its impact. His new paintings rely on the visual language of shape, form, color, and line to tell a story, and reproduce an illusion of visible reality. Take a look at our preview of “Catascopes” below.

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
On Saturday, Copro Gallery pulled back the curtains for "Suggestivism: Chronology" (previewed here), curated by Nathan Spoor. This is the fifth installment of "Suggestivism", Spoor's moniker for fantastical, figurative work that 'suggests' to be more than it seems.  In the 1890s, art historian Sadakichi Hartmann defined it in his writings as a style “of poetic mysticism and psychological intensity.” Spoor chose 42 contemporary artists whose work shares a surreal, poetic-like quality, such as Aron Wiesenfeld, Chet Zar, Nicoletta Ceccolli, Dan May, Hsiao-Ron Cheng, Naoto Hattori, Charlie Immer, Gregory Jacobsen, Sarah Joncas, and more.
This month coincides with the rising of Sirius, Orion's dog star, from which the dog days of summer take their namesake and Copro Gallery's upcoming group show. Inspired by the summer star, the participating artists of "Summer Soirée" draw upon seasonal and fantastical themes for the exhibition. In particular, the exhibit features a new series of acrylic paintings by Florida based artist Scott Scheidly, previously covered here on the blog. His portraits play on the mythological associations of Sirius with oncoming heat, fevers and evil, as in Homer's Iliad.
Greg Escalante has been an important figure and catalyst of new contemporary art for the past twenty years. Through his work as Copro Gallery director, co-founder of Juxtapoz magazine, and avid art collector, he's helped catapult some of the scene's most well known artists to prominence. On Saturday night, he began a new venture with the grand opening of the Gregorio Escalante Gallery in the Chinatown area of Los Angeles. The gallery's first exhibition showcases some of the most notable and interesting pieces in Escalante's collection, aptly titled "The Collection."
Artist and curator Nathan Spoor takes over Copro Gallery in Santa Monica this month for another iteration of his "Suggestivism" group show, an annual exhibition with a rotating roster of contemporary artists. Spoor coined the term "Suggestivism" during his graduate studies to describe the type of ambiguous, fantastical figurative art he was creating. He later discovered that art historian Sadakichi Hartmann used the term as early as 1890 to describe “an art that is possibly more than it seems, or possibly an art that is not what it seems.” The description seems apt for the collection of dreamlike, imagination-driven works in the show, featuring artists like Amy Sol, Dan May, Scott Musgrove, Heidi Tailifer, Michael Page, Hannah Yata and Marco Mazzoni. Spoor has staged past versions of the show in LA, Rome and New York. Take a look at the new work in this year's rendition below.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List