Ed
BECOMING WITHOUT END: THE EVER-TRANSFORMING PRACTICE OF ED MOSES
AUG 14 - SEP 27, 2025
Moses
BECOMING WITHOUT END:
The Ever-Transforming Practice of Ed Moses
AUG 14 - SEP 27, 2025 | Gallery Chang, New York
Within the canon of postwar American abstraction, Ed Moses holds a singular and paradoxical position: both foundational and defiantly fluid. As a key figure of the Los Angeles–based “Cool School” in the late 1950s, Moses exhibited alongside Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, and others at the seminal Ferus Gallery—yet consistently resisted the constraints of any one movement. He was never static, never still: not on the periphery, but always in flux.
Becoming Without End reframes Moses not only as a central figure in West Coast art, but as a major force in the larger arc of contemporary abstraction. Over six decades, Moses dissolved the boundaries between gesture and geometry, structure and improvisation, through a relentlessly process-driven practice. His paintings emerged less as composed images than as lived acts—visual records of risk, immediacy, and transformation.
Moses’s trajectory traces a profound lineage across postwar art: rooted in the performative mark-making of Abstract Expressionism, moving through the ascetic clarity of Postminimalism, and extending into the experimental materiality of contemporary process-based work. Each body of work marked not a destination but a turning point—a leap into new formal vocabularies without disavowing the past. He moved forward by rupture, yet carried continuity like breath.
In an era increasingly defined by consistency, authorship, and visual branding, Moses’s career offers a radical counter-model: a life’s work animated by impermanence, doubt, and becoming. He rejected the notion of signature style in favor of constant reinvention—of painting as an act of surrender, not mastery.
This exhibition is not a retrospective in the conventional sense. Becoming Without End is an invocation: a call to encounter Moses’s work as an evolving field of energy, where each surface is a threshold. It invites us to engage with the deeper ethos of artistic creation—not as a quest for finality, but as a perpetual opening.
ED MOSES
UNITED STATES. 1926-2018
BIOGRAPHY
1955 B.A., University of California, Los Angeles
1958 M.A., University of California, Los Angeles
1958-60 Lived in New York
1963-64 Traveled in Europe
1968 Fellow at Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles
1968-72
Taught at University of California, Los Angeles
1971 Lithography for Bernard Jacobson, Ltd., done in London, England
1972 Traveled in Europe: Germany and France (documented)
1975-76
Taught at University of California, Los Angeles
1976 Received National Endowment for the Arts Grant
Traveled in Egypt, Greece and Israel
1977 Taught at California State College, Bakersfield
1978 Traveled in Europe
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.
Lived in New York
1984 Received California Arts Council Commission
Lived in New York
1985-86 Taught at California State University, Long Beach
1986 Traveled in Europe
1987 Traveled in England and Italy
1988 Traveled in Spain
1989 Traveled in Europe and Korea
1990 Traveled in Japan
2001 Traveled in Europe and Morocco
2002 Traveled in Italy
2006-2008 Traveled in Europe
1990-2018 Lived and worked in Venice, CA.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2022
“Ed Moses: California Cool,” JD Malat Gallery, London
2021 “Ed Moses Edges / Magmas / Waterfalls: Select Paintings from the Estate 1994-2008,” - Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
“Ed Moses: Whiplines, Waterfalls and Worms,” JD Malat Gallery, London
“Ed Moses: Gesture,” Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco, CA
2019 “Ed Moses & Qin Feng,” Blain Southern, London
“Ed Moses: Through the Looking Glass,” William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2018 “Ed Moses: Diamond Jim,” Albertz Benda Gallery, New York, NY
2017 “Ed Moses Chance & Circumstance,” William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2016 “Ed Moses - First, look at the paintings. Then we’ll shoot the shit.” Blain Southern, London
“Ed Moses: Painting as Process,” Albertz Benda Gallery, New York, NY
“Ed Moses: LA – San Francisco,” Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco, CA “Moses@90,” William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2015 “Ed Moses: The Garden of Forking Paths,” Quint Gallery, La Jolla, CA
“Ed Moses Now and Then,” William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
“Ed Moses: Drawings from the 1960s and 70s,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
2014 “Ed Moses: Cross-Section,” University Art Gallery, UC Irvine, CA
“The Language of Paint: Selected Works,” William Turner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
1998 Wyndy Morehead Gallery, New Orleans, LA
1997 Tustin Renaissance Gallery, Tustin, CA
1996 Wyndy Morehead Gallery, New Orleans, LA “Range of Motion” Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA “Burnt Offerings”
1995 Kavish Gallery, Ketchum, ID
1991 Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
1990 L.A. Artcore, Los Angeles, CA “Uprisings”
Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA
1989 Modern Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA “Recent Large Scale Sculpture In Steel”
1986 Mills House Gallery, Garden Grove, CA
1976 The Sculpture Gallery, San Diego, CA
1975 Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2025 “Walter Darby Bannard and Ed Moses: Two Post-Painterly Abstractionists,”
-Cuenca Contemporary Art Center-Antonio Perez Foundation, Cuenca, Spain
2022 “Ferus: A Visual Conversation,” JD Malat Gallery, London, England
“Chromatic Scale,” Royale Projects, Los Angeles, CA
2020 “Panta Rhei Everything Flows,” Albertz Benda, Online Exclusive
2017 “Playground Structure,” BlainSouthern, London, England
“California Dreaming: Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston & Ed Ruscha,”
New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT
2016 “Painting After Postmodernism,” Roberto Polo Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
2011-2012
“Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
“Pacific Standard Time: Cross-Currents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970,”
-The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA
“It Happened at Pomona: Art at Pomona College 1969-1972; Part II: Helene Winter at Pomona,”
-Pomona College Museum of Art
“Best Kept Secret: UCI and the Development of Contemporary Art in Southern California, 1964-1971,”
-Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA
“Two Schools of Cool,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA
“Artistic Evolution: Southern California Artists at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County 1945-1963,”
-Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles, CA
2011 “Marks and Movement: Five Painters,” Barrett Art Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
“5.LITE,” MK2Projects, Los Angeles, CA
2009 “Visionaire,” Fellini Gallery, Shanghai, China
“Los Angeles Now: Larry Bell / Joe Goode / Ed Moses” Seiler + Mosseri-Marlio Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland
2008 “Thinking About Walter Hopps,” Patrick Painter Inc.
“California in New York,” Hubert Gallery, New York, NY
SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH
Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Baker Museum, Naples, FL
Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA
Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, CA
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
Cincinnati Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH
Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College Gallery, Hanover, NH
Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
Irvine Foundation Collection, Irvine, CA
Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Los Angeles Times Collection, Los Angeles, CA
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, Miami, FL
Menil Collection, Houston, TX
Monterey Musem of Art, CA
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand
Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, Poland
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM
Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA
Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA
Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach CA
Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
AWARDS
Tamarind Lithography Workshop Fellowship, 1968, Los Angeles, CA.
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant, 1976
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1980
Long Beach City College Hall of Fame Inductee, 1993
Honorary Ph.D., Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, CA., 1996
1. ART HISTORICAL POSITION
A central figure in Light and Space / West Coast abstraction
A West Coast response to East Coast Abstract
Expressionism
Variations and serial experimentation
Ed Moses (1926–2018) is closely associated with Los Angeles’s “Cool School” and the Light and Space movement. His work embodies the experimental spirit and material inquiry that defined West Coast abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s.
In contrast to New York centered Abstract Expressionism, Moses advanced a more experimental, materially driven, and optically saturated West Coast idiom.
Renowned for reinventing his approach roughly every six to seven years, Moses treated the studio as a laboratory, cutting and recombining canvases and mixing resin, sand, and metallic powders to push the possibilities of painting.
2. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WORK
Intense optical experience
Non-objectivity
Material experimentation
Through sharp chromatic contrasts, texture, layering, and reflective surfaces, Moses unsettles visual and spatial perception. The Magma series, in particular, stages a lava-like energy where reds collide with darker tonal fields.
Avoiding specific imagery, his paintings operate as self-contained physical and psychological events.
Across decades he combined heterogeneous media including acrylic, vinyl, latex, resin, metallic powders, and graphite to produce singular surface effects.
3. MARKET CONSIDERATIONS
Strong institutional holdings
Posthumous price stability
Renewed attention to West Coast modern and contemporary art
Moses’s works are in major museum collections including MoMA, LACMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim, supporting longterm credibility and value.
Since his passing in 2018, key series such as Magma, Plank, and Diagonal have trended on a stable, upward trajectory without experiencing a sharp correction.
Over the past decade, the rebalancing of New York centered narratives has fueled fresh scholarship and demand for Los Angeles based artists such as Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston, and Larry Bell.
Collector preference for large formats
Moses’s large-scale works, particularly those measuring 60 × 80 inches and above, are widely regarded as peak statements and are favored by institutions and top-tier collectors.
Grid B
In Grid B, Moses revisits one of his enduring visual structures—the grid—but infuses it with layered color and shifting rhythm. Diagonal bands intersect to form a dense lattice, their overlapping lines creating a vibrant interplay of transparency, opacity, and hue. Flashes of green, red, white, and black pulse through the structure, producing an almost optical vibration. While the grid might suggest order and stability, Moses treats it as a living system, open to variation and chance. This late-career work demonstrates his lifelong commitment to exploring pattern not as a static form, but as a dynamic field in which structure and improvisation continually collide.
ED MOSES | 2017, Acrylic on canvas, 72 × 60 in | 182.9 × 152.4 cm
Ocnal
Part of Ed Moses’s celebrated Magma series, Ocnal radiates an intense, subterranean energy. Large, fractured black and gray forms drift across the surface like cooled lava plates, their mottled textures revealing the effects of water, gravity, and pigment interaction. The fissures between them glow with vibrant crimson, evoking molten heat seeping through the cracks. Moses’s gestural handling and controlled accidents transform the canvas into a dynamic geological field—at once abstract and visceral. In the Magma works, Moses explored the elemental forces of creation and destruction, using bold color contrasts and surface variation to suggest a world in constant transformation.
ED MOSES | 2002, Acrylic on canvas, 80 × 60 in | 203.2 × 152.4 cm
Felco
Part of Moses’s iconic Magma series, Felco juxtaposes sweeping black and gray gestural marks against an electrifying red ground. The curling, ribbon-like strokes seem to hover and twist above the surface, their textured edges revealing both the viscosity of the paint and the speed of the artist’s hand. Occasional specks of red peek through the darker passages, heightening the work’s sense of depth and movement. In the Magma paintings, Moses harnessed the dramatic tension between fiery color and shadowy form, creating compositions that feel simultaneously physical and atmospheric— as if the gestures themselves are suspended in a charged, molten space.
ED MOSES | 2002, Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 48 in | 152.4 × 121.9 cm
Check #2
In Check #2, Moses combines geometric rigor with painterly spontaneity. Gridded forms, rendered in bold black lines, alternate between open and filled spaces, creating a rhythm across the surface. Over this structured base, he introduces irregular shapes and splashes of red, disrupting the order with bursts of energy. The layered composition suggests a dialogue between control and improvisation—a hallmark of Moses’s practice. The work’s interplay of pattern and gesture invites the eye to move restlessly, tracing shifts in density, direction, and texture. By merging crisp structure with raw markmaking, Moses transforms the familiar grid into a dynamic field of visual tension and surprise.
ED MOSES | 2003, Acrylic on canvas, 54 × 66 in | 137.2 × 167.6 cm
Topal
In Topal, Moses fuses gestural abstraction with the assertive geometry of the grid. Broad diagonal sweeps of textured black create a dynamic, almost atmospheric background, against which angular panels of pale pink and white stand out. These shapes are overlaid with bold black lines, recalling architectural scaffolding or fragments of an urban map. The contrast between the soft, organic ground and the sharp, structured overlays produces a layered tension that is central to Moses’s work. Here, as in much of his practice, he treats painting as a space for collision—between gesture and structure, improvisation and order—inviting viewers to navigate its fractured yet harmonious terrain.
ED MOSES | 2004, Acrylic on canvas, 72 × 60 in | 182.9 × 152.4 cm
Acota
In Acota, Ed Moses uses sweeping, gestural brushstrokes in layered shades of black and grey to create a dynamic surface that feels both spontaneous and deliberate. The looping marks move across the canvas like calligraphic traces, revealing subtle shifts in pressure and translucency. Painted late in his career, this work reflects Moses’s enduring fascination with process and the act of painting itself—eschewing fixed imagery in favor of continual exploration. The monochromatic palette draws attention to the movement of the brush and the interplay of light and texture, inviting viewers to experience the painting as a record of motion, energy, and the artist’s physical engagement with the canvas.
ED MOSES | 2006, Acrylic on canvas, 72 × 60 in | 182.9 × 152.4 cm
Diag-Queen
With Diag-Queen, Moses transforms a strict diamond-grid structure into a vibrating field of visual energy. The patterned lattice is overlaid with spiraling, rose-like motifs that interrupt its symmetry, creating moments of organic softness within the geometric framework. Fine, jagged lines fracture the surface, suggesting both movement and erosion, while the restrained palette keeps the focus on rhythm and form. This interplay between order and disruption—between the mechanical and the hand-drawn—embodies Moses’s lifelong engagement with pattern as a living, mutable language. The result is a surface that feels both stable and in flux, inviting prolonged looking to uncover its layered intricacies.
ED MOSES | 2013, Mixed media on canvas, 72 × 48 in | 182.9 × 121.9 cm
