Ed Moses: A Retrospective of the Paintings and Drawings, 1951-1996 was the first full-scale retrospective of this Southern California artist's work. Broadly affiliated with “The Cool School”—a historic generation of artists based in LA who defined the West Coast art scene of the 1950s and 1960s—Moses explored a diverse set of themes and styles throughout his career, humorously describing himself as “The Mutator.” The exhibition featured sixty paintings and drawings spanning the artist’s oeuvre up to that point, highlighting several related yet distinct bodies of work. These included his first breakthrough series of 1961, a series of graphite drawings replicating a pattern of roses from a table cover; his “resin” paintings of the early 1970s, in which Moses applied powdered pigment and resin to manipulated, un-stretched canvases; his grid paintings of the 1970s and 1980s; his expressionistic paintings of brush trails, which he called “worms”; and the latest body of work, a series of large-scale, abstract paintings of airy, open spaces.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue.
Ed Moses: A Retrospective of the Paintings and Drawings, 1951-1996 was organized by John Yau, Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.