INTRO
Within the canon of postwar American abstraction, Ed Moses holds a singular and paradoxical position: both foundational and defiantly fluid. As a key figure of the Los Angeles–based “Cool School” in the late 1950s, Moses exhibited alongside Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, and others at the seminal Ferus Gallery—yet consistently resisted the constraints of any one movement. He was never static, never still: not on the periphery, but always in flux.
Becoming Without End reframes Moses not only as a central figure in West Coast art, but as a major force in the larger arc of contemporary abstraction. Over six decades, Moses dissolved the boundaries between gesture and geometry, structure and improvisation, through a relentlessly process-driven practice. His paintings emerged less as composed images than as lived acts—visual records of risk, immediacy, and transformation.
Moses’s trajectory traces a profound lineage across postwar art: rooted in the performative mark-making of Abstract Expressionism, moving through the ascetic clarity of Postminimalism, and extending into the experimental materiality of contemporary process-based work. Each body of work marked not a destination but a turning point—a leap into new formal vocabularies without disavowing the past. He moved forward by rupture, yet carried continuity like breath.
In an era increasingly defined by consistency, authorship, and visual branding, Moses’s career offers a radical counter-model: a life’s work animated by impermanence, doubt, and becoming. He rejected the notion of signature style in favor of constant reinvention—of painting as an act of surrender, not mastery.
This exhibition is not a retrospective in the conventional sense. Becoming Without End is an invocation: a call to encounter Moses’s work as an evolving field of energy, where each surface is a threshold. It invites us to engage with the deeper ethos of artistic creation—not as a quest for finality, but as a perpetual opening.
