In a career spanning five decades, Los Angeles artist Ed Moses has been an inventive and prolific abstract painter. 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. In the course of his career he has explored many styles through the process of painting. His work ranges from compositions featuring repeated patterns, to large fields of flowing color or to hard-edged geometric forms. For him, color is not used to describe objects, but rather to establish pure aesthetic experience.
Moses often speaks about non-objective art, and insists that he has no pre-conceived image or idea. He has stated, “I don’t believe in change. I believe in mutation, and every painting I make comes out of the painting that preceded it. What I want to do is hang out with the materials until something appears that I had nothing to do with.”
Ed Moses has been exhibiting since 1949, and was part of the original group of artists from the Ferus Gallery in 1957. His paintings were documented in a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. The Fellows of Contemporary Art sponsored a drawing retrospective for Moses in 1976. Works by Moses are included in museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Menil Foundation, Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
