Ed Moses 1926 - 2018 saving the best for last
December 15, 2020 - February 6, 20211
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archival photograph by Alan Shaffer
Contents 01 Ed Moses: Forever Fresh essay by Frances Colpitt
08 Paintings
34 Archival Images
42 Biography
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Forever Fresh “The process of painting came to him as naturally as breathing, as if the brush were an extension of his arm and body, and the paint a bodily fluid...” This vibrant tribute exhibition honors Ed Moses. Moses was a central figure in the development of the legendary art scene in Los Angeles, where he exhibited at the first truly avant-garde gallery in the region. Ferus Gallery opened in 1957, founded by artist Ed Kienholz and curator, critic, and intellectual dynamo Walter Hopps, who recognized Moses’s budding talent among the lively young abstract expressionists in Los Angeles and San Francisco showcased by the gallery. Moses’s first solo exhibition at Ferus doubled as his UCLA master’s degree show in 1958, to the chagrin—and no doubt envy—of many of his professors. Dubbed the “Cool School” by Artforum critic Philip Leider, Moses and his famous Ferus colleagues, Craig Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Ken Price, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and Ed Ruscha, went on to exhibit at major museums and galleries throughout the world. Singularly, however, Moses remained committed to the spontaneity, improvisation, and loose gestures associated with abstract expressionism. Tempering his Dionysian streak, Moses’s early training
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and employment as a draftsman led to his embrace of the pencil and straightedge, and most importantly, the grid. Antithetical to his freewheeling gestures, grids supply the structure for many of his youthful works and, typically limned with a rough board or wooden slat, reappear throughout his life’s production. In the 1970s and 80s, Moses synthesized these tendencies in series of black and red paintings with dizzily layered diagonal grids interwoven with boldly colored streaks and splashes. The dialogue of gesture and grid is beautifully summarized in Telluride Gallery’s exhibition of his late works.Like abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, whom he greatly admired, Moses is known as a “painter’s painter.” The process of painting came to him as naturally as breathing. As if the brush were an extension of his arm and body, and the paint a bodily fluid, this bionic relationship to his tools and materials is plainly evident in the finished and ever fresh paintings. In fact, finger painting led to Moses’s original, split-second decision to become an artist: Moses’s novice attempt at a classroom still life by
applying paint to canvas with his fingers was singled out for praise by his first painting teacher, at Long Beach City College. In addition to his fingers, Moses used a variety of nontraditional painting tools such as squeegees, mops, sponges, squirt bottles, and chalk snap lines. His materials include oil, acrylic, and dayglow paint, asphaltum, resin, rhoplex, glitter, and iridescent pigments. Working out of doors on his deck, he often painted on both sides of an unprimed canvas or washed the paint with a garden hose to produce stains he referred to as “ghosts.” Throughout the seven decades of his career, Moses’s high-decibel color sense continued to develop. Rarely tonal or modulated—except to the extent that a swipe of the squeegee or brush pulls rainbows of contrasting hues across the surface—his colors are brash and jarring: pink and orange, turquoise and lime green, or lemon yellow and magenta. His colors grew more saturated and intense, his application of them more impulsive and urgent, evoking ever deeper emotional resonance. As his life progressed, Moses felt a strong kinship with shamans and prehistoric cave painters. The raw vigor of his process combined with the dark mysteries of the painted caves came to fruition in this last body of work.
- Frances Colpitt Art critic, corresponding editor to Art in America, Deedie Potter Rose Chair of Art History at Texas Christian University 7
“Just look, dont think. It is what it is.” - Ed Moses
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WRR #1, 2017 acrylic on canvas 18” x 14”
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WHIR #1, 2018 acrylic on canvas 18” x 14”
WHIR #18, 2018 acrylic on canvas 18” x 14”
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WRR, 2017 acrylic on canvas 18” x 14”
WHT, 2017 acrylic on canvas 18” x 14”
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“My painting is the encounter between the mind’s necessity for control and its yearning to fly...” - Ed Moses
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Spatz #8, 2017 acrylic on canvas 18” x 24”
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Zip #1, 2017 acrylic on canvas 24” x 30”
Zip #8, 2017 acrylic on canvas 24” x 30”
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“I’m never inspired, I’m obsessed, and I look forward everyday to paint.” - Ed Moses
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Woop #7, 2017 acrylic on canvas 16” x 20”
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Woop #1, 2017 acrylic on canvas 16” x 20”
Woop #2, 2017 acrylic on canvas 16” x 20”
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“These are all self portaits. These paintings have history, action, scars and blemishes, scratches and imperfections. These are me.� - Ed Moses
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OH #13, 2016 acrylic on canvas 30” x 24”
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OH #9, 2016 acrylic on canvas 30” x 24”
OH #1, 2016 acrylic on canvas 30” x 24”
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“I don’t make paintings, I find paintings.” - Ed Moses
17 UT (EM17 171), 2016 acrylic on canvas 40” x 30”
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“The point is not to be in control, but to be in tune.” - Ed Moses
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Iowe, 2017 acrylic on canvas 60” x 48”
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Fruitbar #11, 2016 acrylic on canvas 24” x 30”
Fruitbar #3, 2016 acrylic on canvas 24” x 30”
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“I am an action painter. These paintings are ways I can act out a thought or feeling.” - Ed Moses
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AE #6, 2016 acrylic on canvas 60” x 48”
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Archival photo of Ed Moses in Studio
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Photograph by Alan Shaffer
The artists represented on the following pages were dear friends of Ed’s for over 40 years. Each have become masters in their own right. Collectively, they represent the long unbroken tradition of abstraction in Southern California.
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Joe Goode
Robert Graham
Ed Moses
Ed Ruscha
Larry Bell
Kenny Price
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Frances Colpitt
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Ed Moses
John M. Miller
James Hayward
Edith Baumann
Scoty Hey-
“There is a sense of adventure through all of Ed’s work. He surprises you again and again.” - James Hayward
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“I have known Ed all my life, though his last years were, for me, most memorable. I remember sitting with him on several occasions, talking for hours about art, life, love, truth, and everything that remains when life’s obligations fall away. Many truths lie within his works; and when I see them, I am not only reminded of my teacher, but also of my dear friend. These late paintings are the crescendo of a lifetime of dedication and passion. The freedom Ed discovered through these paintings shine vibrantly through. Ed Moses bodly created until the end of his life, and never will that cease to inspire me.” - Ashley Hayward Owner Telluride Gallery of Fine Art
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Ashley Hayward
Ed Moses
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Biography Ed Moses
April 9, 1926 – January 17, 2018 Born Long Beach, California Established studio in Venice, California 1955 B.A., University of California, Los Angeles 1958 M.F.A., University of California, Los Angeles 1980 Received Guggenheim Fellowship. Traveled in Japan 1981-82 Lived in New York. Traveled in France and Canada 1983 Taught at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME 1995 Received Honorary Doctorate Degree, Otis College of Art and Design
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Public Collections Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY Akron Art Institute of Art, Akron, OH Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Cincinnati Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Dartmouth College Gallery, Hanover, NH Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO Gelco Collection, Minneapolis, MN Hereditary Disease Foundation, Los Angeles, CA Irvine Collection, Irvine, CA Janss Foundation, Thousand Oaks, CA Lannan Foundation, Chicago, IL Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Los Angeles Times Collection, Los Angeles, CA Menil Foundation, Rice Museum, Houston, TX Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, La Jolla, CA Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, NM National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, CA Oakland Museum of Art, Oakland, CA Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA Pasadena Art Museum (Norton Simon Museum of Art), Pasadena, CA Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA Prudential Insurance Company, Newark, NJ San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS University of Miami, Miami, FL Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Frederick Weisman Foundation Collection, Los Angeles, CA Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
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