Ed Moses | The Garden of Forking Paths: Quint Contemporary Art: 7547 Girard Avenue

Oct 10 - Nov 21, 2015
Installation Views
Overview

Quint Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by renowned Los Angeles artist Ed Moses. This is the first solo exhibition by Moses at Quint Gallery and will feature new abstract paintings. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, October 10th from 6-8pm, is open to the public, and the artist will be in attendance.

The title of this exhibition, THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS, references a tale in Jorge Luis Borges’ collection of short stories called Labyrinths; the story is layered in metaphors about a man who sets himself on a mission he deems impossible:

“The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.”

Ed Moses is a well-established artist known for his grid drawings from the 1970s and his innovative approach to painting. On view will be new grid paintings and a new series of craquelure paintings in black and white. Ever the innovator, the craquelure paintings offer a new technique to his painting repertoire while also referencing the cracking paint patterns found in Old Masters’ paintings. The large-scale paintings look like oversized, close-ups of painting surfaces. The layered grid paintings hark back to Piet Mondrian and in this way Moses creates infinite patterns from finite systems.

Ed Moses was involved in the famed Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles from 1958 when he showed his graduate exhibition at the gallery. Moses was part of the “Cool School” that dominated the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s and included other greats like Robert Irwin, Ken Price and Craig Kauffman, all innovators in the use of alternative materials. Moses has been an influence on generations of artists as a teacher at the University of California, Irvine, which hosted a retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre in 2014. Moses had a drawing retrospective in 2015 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which featured over 100 drawings including work from the museum’s collection. In 1996, Moses had a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Moses’ work is included in the collections of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, among others. Ed Moses lives and works in Venice, CA.