Ed Moses: Last Grids

Brian Gross Fine Art is pleased to announce Ed Moses: Last Grids, a memorial exhibition of recent paintings by the late, internationally renowned Los Angeles artist, opening on Saturday, September 8, 2018, with a reception from 4–6pm. On view will be six diagonal grid paintings created during the final year of his long career of over six decades.  Ed Moses passed away earlier this year at the age of 91.  The exhibition will be on view through October 27, 2018.

Full of strength and precision, the paintings in Last Grids reveal Ed Moses at his creative height during his final years.  Originating the diagonal grid in the mid-1970s, Moses began employing this structure to further explore spatial depth and patterning in his paintings.  He returned to the grid throughout his career, each time discovering new territories to explore.  Unlike the grids from his 2016 exhibition with the gallery, the works in Last Grids display a variety of surfaces, ranging from thickly applied gestures to watery thin passages of rich color.  Built up in overlapping strokes of vibrant hues, Moses’ crisscrossing lines variously invite entrance and bar passage into their layered surfaces.  Exploring a signature motif in his career, the works in the exhibition reveal Moses’ continued search through the depths of abstraction for undiscovered territory. 

Ed Moses was one of the original artists affiliated with the legendary Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, which held his first show of abstract paintings in 1958.  The driving force behind the creation of his work was the intuitive process of painting, in which Moses emphasized gesture, mark making, and exploration of the painted surface.  Moses’ return to the grid in his final years was in large part precipitated by the 2015 exhibition Ed Moses: Drawings from the 1960s and 70s held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which included early grid drawings that had not been seen for decades. 

Ed Moses was born in Long Beach, CA in 1926 and received his BA and MA from the University of California, Los Angeles. His career began at the Ferus Gallery in 1958, and in the same year he also exhibited at the Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco. In 1996, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles presented a mid-career retrospective exhibition. Ed Moses was included in Pacific Standard Time at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in 2012, and in 2015, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art held a survey exhibition of his drawings.

Ed Moses’ work is represented in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Menil Collection, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Yale University Art Gallery; Art Institute of Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; Denver Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; UC Berkeley Art Museum; and the Oakland Museum of California, among others.  Last Grids is the artist’s 13th solo exhibition with the gallery.