A Master of His Class Ready to Astonish Santa Monica

William Turner Gallery to present, Ed Moses: Chance and Circumstance, an exhibition featuring new works by the prolific Los Angeles-based painter

A master of his class is about to astonish the art world once more as he is set to present a new exhibition entitled Chance and Circumstance from March 25-27.

Ed Moses, an artist that is known nation wide, will present Chance and Circumstance, an exhibition featuring new works and it will be held at the William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica.

A self-described “mutator” and compulsive creator, he is still producing work at a staggering pace, undeterred by his 91st birthday upcoming in April. The artist has experienced a period of revitalized productivity and has been creating some of his most inventive and challenging works to date. As part of an unprecedented exhibition cycle presenting Moses’s second major project with the gallery in two consecutive years, Chance and Circumstance will include new, never-before-seen paintings alongside a selection of earlier works.

Among the new bodies of work included in the exhibition are recent iterations of Moses’s dynamic grid paintings. These have never implied static formal stability for Moses but rather frameworks in flux. Delineated by thick bands of black, white, and gray, the grids are punctuated by splatters and drips of vibrant, sometimes neon, colors. In Moses’s hands, this typically rigid geometric formation is transformed allowing the superimposition of marks to emerge and recede for a deeper sense of dimensional space. The more gestural abstract motif of Moses’s “worm” paintings reappears in this exhibition as well. These curvilinear, tunnel-like passages seem to undulate and carve out pictorial space from within, conveying the unmistakable feeling of spontaneity so integral to Moses’s work.

Frit #4 by Ed Moses

“The rational mind constantly wants to be in charge. The other parts want to fly. My painting is the encounter between the mind’s necessity for control and its yearning to fly, to be free from our ever-confining skull.” – Ed Moses

The phrase “chance and circumstance” has become something of a mantra for Moses.  A student of Buddhism, he has made a career of fearlessly blazing down the path of the unknown. A practice of daily meditation keeps Moses anchored in the present, a lifestyle choice and sensibility, which is evident in his paintings.

Moses bypasses the need to be in control and favors the idea of being in tune with the pieces he is coaxing into existence. “My paintings are on an endless path,” said Moses. The relinquish of control “allows him to step outside himself, letting his materials direct his hand without conscious interferences,” said art historian Barbara Haskell.