Gallery Chang in Midtown Manhattan is presenting the retrospective exhibition Ed Moses: Becoming Without End from August 14 through September 27. The exhibition introduces key works from Ed Moses (1926–2018), a leading figure of the postwar Los Angeles art scene, including representative pieces from his Acota, Magma, and Grid series.
In the 1950s and 60s, Ed Moses was active in the art group known as the “Cool School,” alongside artists such as Craig Kauffman, Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Edward Kienholz, John Altoon, Ken Price, and Billy Al Bengston. Centered around the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, the Cool School developed an experimental and free visual language that stood apart from the New York–centered Abstract Expressionism of the time.
For Moses, painting was a “laboratory,” and he continuously pursued change. Every six or seven years, he would shift his style—cutting and reconstructing canvases, or mixing materials such as resin, sand, and metal powder to create entirely new painterly surfaces.
A representative work from the experimental Magma series, Ocnal (2002), shows intense energy, with lava-like red tones erupting from within black fissures. Check #2 (2003) introduces an orderly grid, yet disrupts it with irregular brushstrokes and colors, creating a surface where order and chaos coexist. In the late work Grid B (2017), Moses returns to the grid, but layered color planes seem to vibrate, giving the illusion that the painting itself is alive and breathing.
Ed Moses was born in 1926 in Long Beach, California, and received his BFA and MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). From 1968, he taught at the University of California, Irvine, and in 1980 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1991, and in 1996 the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) held a major retrospective titled Ed Moses: A Retrospective of the Paintings and Drawings, 1951–1996. His works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and others. His son, Andy Moses (b. 1962), is also a painter and earlier this year held a solo exhibition at Gallery Chang titled ANDY MOSES: RECENT WORKS.
Curator Jinnie Kang of Gallery Chang stated that she organized this exhibition in the hope that “for New York audiences, this will not be merely a retrospective, but an opportunity to encounter Moses’s experimental spirit as it is newly reactivated each time.”
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