SANTA MONICA.- Leslie Sacks Contemporary announces an exhibition of works by Venice Beach artist Ed Moses. The exhibition consists of two new series of paintings by the 87 year old abstract expressionist painter.

The exhibition title, A Stone Mirror Reversed, alludes to the collection of short stories, Ficciones byJorge Luis Borges. A mid century author of science fiction, Borges is known for his layered narratives that can be understood in multiple ways, allowing all the possibilities to unfold. Moses interest in Borges’ writing has a direct connection to his practice as a painter.

In Borges’ short story The Garden of the Forking Paths, the author describes a world where all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously through time in a labrynth-like manner. Ed Moses has able been to relate this concept to his iconic grid paintings. Similar to the themes in Borges’ writings, Ed Moses’ cube paintings can be seen as layers of pathways in both time and space. They challenge the viewer to decipher where the works begin and end, where they push and pull, where to enter and where to exit.

In Ed Moses’ latest series of transfer paintings, known as the reversals, he takes older works and pulls the paint through the back of the canvas. To explain the idea behind these works, Ed Moses points to the stone mirror described in Borges’ Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius another short story in Ficciones. The stone mirror is an object that embodies the temporal activity that occurs while making these paintings. Just as light travels to a stone mirror where it is absorbed and reflected as an image in reverse, the paint is absorbed through the canvas and reconstituted as a reflection or reversal of the former painting.

Ed Moses was born in Long Beach, California, in 1926 and received his BA and MA from the University of California, Los Angeles. His career began in the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1958. In 1996, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles presented a full-scale retrospective of his career. His work is included in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Menil Foundation, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.