Mutator

Recent paintings and drawings by Ed Moses are the subject of an extraordinary exhibition at two galleries in Bergamot Station during May and June. The large-scale abstract works of Ed Moses will be presented in simultaneous shows at Frank Lloyd Gallery and Greenfield Sacks Gallery. The two galleries are collaborating in order to present the strength and power of the veteran Los Angeles painter, who celebrates his 83rd birthday on April 9th. His prolific output has resulted in a lyrical and expansive body of work, primarily composed of large-scale abstract paintings.

In a career spanning five decades, legendary Los Angeles artist Ed Moses has been an inventive and prolific leader in abstract painting. Moses, born 1926 in Long Beach, studied at UCLA, receiving B.A. and M.A. degrees. He has remained in the Los Angeles area much of his life and is one of the city's outstanding abstract artists. In the course of his career he has relentlessly pursued the process of painting. His work has ranged from compositions featuring repeated patterns to large fields of flowing color. Color is not used to describe objects, but rather to establish pure aesthetic experience.

Moses has an extensive history with the medium of drawing as well, and his lyrical abstractions of the 1950s and 1960s form a major and self-sustaining body of work. 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, un-stretched supports may have helped to refine drawing by meeting it halfway."

Moses has been exhibiting since 1949, and was part of the original group of artists from the legendary Ferus Gallery. His work was documented in a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. Museum collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Menil Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.