SANTA MONICA, CA.- In a career spanning five decades, legendary Los Angeles artist Ed Moses has been an inventive and prolific leader in abstract painting. Moses, born 1926 in Long Beach, studied at UCLA, receiving B.A. and M.A. degrees. He has remained in the Los Angeles area much of his life and is one of the city's outstanding abstract artists. In the course of his career he has explored many styles, and relentlessly pursues the process of painting. His work ranges from compositions featuring repeated decorative patterns, to large fields of flowing color or to hard-edged geometric designs. Color is not used to describe objects, but rather to establish pure aesthetic experience.
His graphics, such as the Wedge prints, reveal his interest in the ways in which the process and materials are united to become the image, purely abstract and referring only to itself. In these works, layers of pigment-impregnated paper are superimposed, creating interpenetrating planes of color imbedded in the physical matter. The overlapping facets of color and geometric patterns of the Wedges suggest the designs of Navajo Indians, but the image is removed from that context to stand alone as an independent abstract work of art.
Moses often speaks about non-objective art, and insists that he has no pre-conceived image or idea. He has stated, "I don't believe in change I believe in mutation, and every painting I make comes out of the painting that preceded it. What I want to do is hang out with the materials until something appears that I had nothing to do with."
Ed Moses has been exhibiting since 1949, and was part of the original group of artists from the Ferus Gallery in 1957. His paintings were documented in a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. The Fellows of Contemporary art sponsored a drawing retrospective for Moses in 1976. Works by Moses are included in museum collections throughout the U.S., such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
The exhibition is on view at
Greenfield Sacks Gallery through June 5, 2010.