ED MOSES: DRAWINGS FROM THE 1960s & 70s / LACMA

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Ed Moses: Drawings from the 1960s and 70s, the first museum presentation of the artist’s drawings in nearly 40 years. Ed Moses has been a significant figure in the development and history of art in Los Angeles since his first monographic exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in 1958. His unconventional materials and techniques led him to a unique mode of expression grounded in graphic experimentation, which included large floral graphite drawings from the 1960s to his signature diagonal grids of the 1970s. Moses has continued to draw throughout his career; however, the drawings of the ’60s and ’70s represent a period of intense experimentation and innovation that has sustained his work, in all media, for years after.

 

Moses’s work from the late 1950s and early 1960s illustrates his interest in gestural abstraction. Beginning in 1961, he looked even farther back to the origins of abstraction and the work of Piet Mondrian in particular. Chrysanthemum Diptych from 1961 is a direct reference to Mondrian’s drawings and paintings of chrysanthemums and is one of Moses’s first works centered on a floral motif.

 

Moses’s interest in the geometry of the grid may also relate to his exploration of architecture, which led to the construction of buildings in the mid-1960s, as well as the “deconstruction” of Mizuno Gallery in 1969. In that pioneering installation piece, Moses removed part of the wall and gallery roof, exposing the wood slats so light could make diagonal patterns on the floor and walls. It is represented in the exhibition through projections of rarely seen documentary images. 

 

Cover photo credit: Ed Moses, Rose Screen, 1963, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum Acquisition Fund, © 2015, Ed Moses, photo © 2015 Museum Associates / LACMA