1. The constant through-line of Dennis Ashbaugh's abstract work is a focus on specific current events as seen through the prism of art history, such as the future, politics, computers, clones, DNA, networks and viruses, though he does not use computers to create these works.
In 1992, Dennis Ashbaugh collaborated with science fiction and cyberpunk novelist William Gibson on the electronic poem Agrippa.
Dennis Ashbaugh cites Gibson and fellow cyberpunk novelist Bruce Sterling as key influences, as well as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Dennis Ashbaugh's grandfathers were a blacksmith and a large landowner and farmer, his father, an electrical planner, and mother, a beautician.
The Dennis Ashbaugh family moved to Anaheim, California, where as a child he intently watched the construction of Disneyland.
Dennis Ashbaugh received a master's degree in 1969 from California State University, Fullerton.
Stella offered him the use of his studio in Costa Mesa, California, and later encouraged Dennis Ashbaugh to move to and paint in New York City.
Dennis Ashbaugh began working on a series entitled "The Ovals" : Large fiberglass paintings using an elliptical format and drums of polyester resin.
Dennis Ashbaugh then sold his Murray Street loft to performance artist Laurie Anderson and moved to 67 Greene Street, a space capable of accommodating his large paintings.
For inspiration, Dennis Ashbaugh turned to the Russian Revolution of 1917, the beginning of abstract, non-objective painting with Malevich, Tatlin, and Lissitzky who themselves were abandoned by the state.
Dennis Ashbaugh's paintings were extremely large and came away six inches from the wall.
Dennis Ashbaugh decided to make work in the warmer months in Laguna Beach, California, where he leased an unfinished indoor-outdoor building with 50-foot ceilings, without doors or windows.
Dennis Ashbaugh lived in a scaffolding to avoid scorpions and rattlesnakes.
Dennis Ashbaugh created large, unwieldy-shaped canvases with the flattest matte paint then available.
Dennis Ashbaugh was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976.
In 1976, Thomas M Messer, Director of the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York, recruited Ashbaugh to help organize and install Alfred Jensen's exhibition for the Sao Paulo Art Biennial representing the United States.
Dennis Ashbaugh traveled to Peru, flew over the Nazca Lines, and contacted Maria Reiche, the German scholar and mathematician who had been studying cataloging and protecting the drawings in Nazca since 1946.
When Dennis Ashbaugh returned to New York City, he began construction of the heavily contorted and large 10'x20' shaped Nazca canvas paintings.
Dennis Ashbaugh thought of them as anthropomorphized planar geometry or as alien landing strips and imagined them placed on a wall vertically, not flat on the ground as in the earthworks in Nazca and Nevada.
At the Dia Art Foundation, Dennis Ashbaugh saw from Andy Warhol's Hammer and Sickle work, that two shapes, even three distinct shapes, would cast only one combined shadow.
Dennis Ashbaugh began a series paintings with multiple images but only one combined shadow.
Dennis Ashbaugh became fascinated by the new technology of paint chemistry and applied flocking to the surfaces.
Since 1974, Dennis Ashbaugh has focused on First Amendment rights with concern for the degradation of journalistic news into a propaganda tool or a pop culture sales hook.
Wintour was taken by way that Dennis Ashbaugh had incorporated the models into the staged artwork and made the decision to use this image as the magazine's centerfold.
When told of the image's placement Dennis Ashbaugh requested that the centerfold become a scratch and sniff that smelled of the models' perfume, a tribute to old porn magazines, a proposal that was of course rejected.
Wintour and Alexander Liberman commissioned Dennis Ashbaugh to do an eight-page spread for Conde Nast using his brightly colored images.
Dennis Ashbaugh began working on the large-scale, colorful Clone Series, conceptually based on the idea that entirety of art history could be placed on a single floppy disk.
Dennis Ashbaugh recognized it as a major technological and cultural event where computer information could be created then co-opted and deleted.
Dennis Ashbaugh used washes of color, alluding to Morris Louis's stain paintings and subtle markings on large-scale canvases.
Dennis Ashbaugh used Corten steel dust, and fugitive fluorescent pigments, which degrade with ultraviolet rays, on large canvases and placed them outside for a year.
Later at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts, Dennis Ashbaugh met Yaniv Erlich an Israeli scientist whose laboratory had just determined that no genetic information is private and can be accessed by anyone.
Dennis Ashbaugh had been painting large DNA works with saturated colors like the washes of his earlier series.
Dennis Ashbaugh is the longtime companion of author Alexandra Penney.