ED MOSES
In a career spanning seven decades, Los Angeles artist Ed Moses has received national and international recognition for his practice. Considered one of LA's most innovative and prolific abstract painters, Moses often spoke about non-objective art, and insisted that he had 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."
Born in 1926 in Long Beach, California, Moses studied at UCLA, receiving B.A. and M.A. degrees and exhibited at the infamous Ferus Gallery while he was still a graduate student in 1958. It was there that Moses would become a member of a group of artists known as the "Cool School"; a group that included Craig Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Edward Kienholz, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, John Altoon and Wallace Berman - all of whom pushed the boundaries of Post War art and shaped the LA art scene at a time when it almost did not exist.
Moses first museum shows were in 1976 at the Wight Gallery at UCLA and a show of new abstract and cubist paintings at LACMA, which marked a transitional moment in his career. While drawing was prominent in his work in the 1960s and early 70s, by the mid 70s, Moses turned primarily to painting.
He was the subject of a major retrospective at MOCA Los Angeles in 1996, and in 2014 he showed at University of California Irvine where he had taught in the seventies. On the occasion of his 2015 drawing show at LACMA, of works from the 1960s and 70s, director Michael Govan commented, "Ed Moses has been central to the history of art making in Los Angeles for more than half a century." That exhibition included more than 40 drawings promised to the museum by the artist.
Moses' work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.