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Larry Bell
Craig Kauffman
Ed Moses
Drawings
September 16-October 28, 2006
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The Frank Lloyd Gallery is pleased to announce a group exhibition of drawings by three well-known Los Angeles artists. Drawings by Ed Moses, Craig Kauffman, and Larry Bell will be presented as a group exhibition of recent work by three veteran artists. Each artist will be represented by abstract works that demonstrate the formal aspects of drawing, yet all three have an extensive history with experimental media. Each artist has addressed the ideas of process and spontaneity in their work. This exhibit also marks an opportunity for the audience to see recent work by major figures from the legendary Ferus Gallery.


Ed Moses will be represented by recent drawings composed of acrylic on Mylar, a translucent drawing support. Moses (born 1926 in Long Beach), has an extensive history with the medium of drawing, and his lyrical abstractions of the 1950s and 1960s form a major and self-sustaining body of work, apart from his paintings. Writing about Ed Moses' drawings from the 1960s, Helene Winer stated "The dominant element in these drawings is the visual evidence of the time/process of actually putting marks on the paper. Since the central image is removed, it is the process that is seen to be of primary importance." Joseph Mashek wrote in a 1976 essay titled Ed Moses and Drawing: "Ed Moses is a prolific producer of drawings-as-drawings. Moses' involvement as a painter with loose, unstretched supports may have helped to refine drawing by meeting it halfway."


Craig Kauffman (born 1932 in Los Angeles) has produced a new body of drawings in the past two years, and selected works will be included in this exhibit. Many of these works demonstrate Kauffman's facility with simple and playful line, sometimes depicting common objects such as tea bowls. However, Kauffman's recent subject matter has also included the playfully erotic image of a high-heeled shoe, or he has ventured into abstraction. Craig Kauffman's buoyant line has always been a part of his repertoire, and is a key element of the paintings, ranging from the abstract canvases of the 1950s to the silk paintings of the 1980s and 1990s. "By all accounts, one of the most gifted and precocious of the Ferus artists was Craig Kauffman," wrote Susan C. Larsen in an essay titled Los Angeles Painting in the Sixties.


Larry Bell has investigated drawing as a support for his unique process of thin film deposition of metallic particles. Larry Bell brought his knowledge of the reflective properties of metallic coatings to works on paper in a series called Vapor Drawings. Bell, (born in Chicago in 1939), has also investigated drawing in combination the process of collage in a series of works titled Fractions, assembling portions of the Vapor Drawings with elements and components derived from the process of coating glass with a thin film of metallic particles. The open yet composed spaces in these drawings and collages are filled with light and reflection, echoing the artist's life-long interest in the properties of light and the controlled exploitation of materials.