The Relentless Reinvention of Ed Moses at William Turner

As Los Angeles continues to reassess the artists who helped define its postwar identity, William Turner Gallery is marking the centennial of Ed Moses’ birth with Moses @ 100, a focused exhibition celebrating one of the city’s most influential and unpredictable painters. Opening July 11 and remaining on view through September 5, the exhibition traces a career built on perpetual reinvention rather than stylistic consistency.

Born in Long Beach in 1926, Moses took an unconventional path to art. After serving as a surgical technician during World War II, he enrolled in a pre-med program before discovering painting and entering UCLA’s MFA program. There he met Craig Kauffman and connected with Walter Hopps, eventually joining the circle of artists associated with the legendary Ferus Gallery. Alongside Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, John Altoon, Wallace Berman, and Edward Kienholz, Moses helped establish Los Angeles as a vital center for contemporary art during the 1950s and 1960s.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Moses resisted developing a signature style. Calling himself a “mutator,” he constantly shifted techniques, materials, and visual languages throughout a career that spanned more than six decades. His series—including Roses, Grids, Jabberwockys, Magmas, Waterfalls, Sponges, and Crackles—reflect an artist driven less by recognizable imagery than by an ongoing investigation into the possibilities of paint itself.

That spirit of experimentation remains one of Moses’ most enduring legacies. Long before process-based painting became a dominant concern for younger generations, Moses embraced uncertainty as a creative principle. A practicing Buddhist from the 1970s onward, he described painting as an act of discovery rather than control, believing each canvas should document an experience instead of illustrating a preconceived idea.

His influence extended beyond the visual arts. Architect Frank Gehry, a longtime friend, credited Moses with reshaping his understanding of creativity, risk-taking, and artistic freedom. Museum leaders have likewise recognized his importance, with Michael Govan describing Moses as a central figure in the history of Los Angeles art.

Moses remained active until his death in 2018, painting daily in his Venice studio well into his nineties. Today his work is represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Broad, the Norton Simon Museum, and numerous other institutions.

Rather than serving as a retrospective, Moses @ 100 offers a concise reminder of why Ed Moses continues to occupy a singular place in American painting: not for arriving at a definitive style, but for refusing to stop searching.