Ed Moses
American, 1926-2018
Ed Moses was one of the most important and enduring figures in postwar American art, and a defining voice in the history of Los Angeles abstraction. Born in Long Beach, California, he studied at UCLA, where he received both his BA and MFA degrees.
Moses was a founding member of the legendary Ferus Gallery, established in Los Angeles in 1957 alongside Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, and Ken Price. The Ferus Gallery became the epicenter of the Los Angeles art world and helped establish Southern California as a major force in contemporary American art.
Throughout a career spanning more than six decades, Moses became renowned for his relentless artistic reinvention. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he refused to settle into a single signature style, instead pursuing a continuous investigation of abstraction, materiality, and process. His work moved through distinct periods of drawing, resin painting, grid compositions, and large-scale gestural abstraction, each series representing a new set of questions about the nature of painting itself.
His mature paintings are characterized by sweeping gestural marks, luminous veils of translucent color, and a dynamic tension between spontaneity and structure. Monumental works such as Moby Dick demonstrate his ability to orchestrate complex visual fields of extraordinary energy and presence at museum scale.
Museum Collections
Museum of Modern Art, New York • Whitney Museum of American Art, New York • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • The Broad, Los Angeles • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art • Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Selected Exhibitions
Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles • Imago Galleries, Palm Desert • Robert Green Fine Arts, Mill Valley • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • Whitney Museum of American Art, New York