Career
He was the first artist to employ deoxyribonucleic acid marking patterns in paintings, in his 1992 work Designer Gene. Ashbaugh’s use of light and color in his large scale paintings of autoradiographs have drawn comparison to Mark Rothko. Ashbaugh moved with his family to Southern California at the age 6, where he learned to surf and lived next door to the now famous Dana Point Mafia.
He earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master’s Degree from the University of California.
He moved to New York City in 1969 to take up residence near leading artists and began immediately showing his paintings in galleries throughout the city and internationally. Ashbaugh is well known for his 1992 collaboration with science fiction and cyberpunk novelist cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson, AGRIPPA A BOOK OF THE DEAD. Ashbaugh himself notes, “Their writings had an important impact on me… When I first walked through the chaos of the East Village and thought, ‘Oh what a lovely place this is.’ lieutenant changed my notion of urban decay”.
Ashbaugh has continually reinvented himself as contemporary society, and the issues facing it, evolve. Dominant themes of his works are computers, clones, deoxyribonucleic acid, networks, and viruses (computer and biological) ‐ though he does not use computers to create these works.
Ashbaugh is currently working on a new series of painting titled “Hiding In Plain Sight”, which focus on privacy issues, ubiquitous surveillance, and genetic databases in the context of 21st century art
Ashbaugh has produced a series of prints and drawings and large group of mosquito trap sculptures, which can be seen at www.mosquitoesmustdie.com. He is working on a book of the same title. These sculptures were the subject of a New Yorker article by Patricia Marx in 2011.