Ed Moses, California Legend, Turns 90 with a Celebration at William Turner Gallery

Not long ago, the painter Ed Moses celebrated his 90th birthday surrounded by old friends at a restaurant in Hollywood. Joining Moses, in addition to a New York Times reporter, were a handful of artist friends, including Ed Bereal and Larry Bell. (Robert Irwin called out sick.) Together, the friends form a group credited with reinventing the L.A. art scene during the 1950s and ’60s. On the occasion of Moses’ birthday, they were being interviewed in part thanks to a recent explosion of interest in their work. 

“Moses @ 90,” currently on view at William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica, is one of several new shows burnishing the legacies of this loose collection of artists. The coterie tended toward genre-agnostic experimentation and endless iteration in the laboratory of Southern California, far from the oppressive (and, at the time, more market-driven) art landscape on the East Coast.

The show spans Moses’ long career, from his early works—created and shown while the artist was still an MFA student at UCLA—to never-before-seen pieces created in the last few years. Regardless of era, the paintings are powerful and brash, a style that by all accounts mimics the artist’s own life. To this day, he professes a hyper-physical relationship with his canvases. Sometimes, he has said, “I drag the painting, kicking and screaming, into my studio.”