Andy Moses: Recent Works Exhibition Video
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Short video celebrating highlights from Andy Moses: Recent Works currently on view at William Turner
WHITE HOT MAGAZINE - Andy Moses: Recent Works
/Anthony Haden-Guest for WHITE HOT MAGAZINE
ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST
Anthony Haden-Guest (born 2 February 1937) is a British-American writer, reporter, cartoonist, art critic, poet, and socialite who lives in New York City and London. He is a frequent contributor to major magazines and has had several books published including TRUE COLORS: The Real Life of the Art World and The Last Party, Studio 54, Disco and the Culture of the Night.
Andy Moses’ father, Ed Moses, was an artist with the Ferus Gallery, now enshrined as LA’s Cool School, and Andy grew up in the Santa Monica Canyon, looking out onto the ocean. He went to the California Institute of Arts, where the Death of Painting was a given and Concept art and Minimalism ruled, so for two years he worked with film and video. But an urge to pick up a brush seized him in his third year and he describes his instant conversion to pigment as a chemical rush. Upon leaving Cal Arts in 1982 he headed straightaway for New York where the break-out of the Neo-Exes had brought painting back to robust life.
Moses’ earliest work in New York were black-and-white abstractions and these were in his first exhibition at Annina Nosei. There was a distinctive edge to his project from the get-go. “I almost went into the scientific world when I was young,” Moses says. “I was very good at math and science. It’s always in the back of my mind and the way I make paintings is kind of scientific. Basically I experiment and try to figure out how paint flows.”
Such thinking entered the content too. “I was taking stories out of the New York Timesand silkscreening them on the sides of images to create complex narratives that were very much about language,” he says. “Things disintegrating, things forming. So I was kind of telling the audience what I was interested in.” The opening of a show in which he had work brought him back to Southern California in January 2000. “I fell in love with LA all over again,” he says. His New York period was done.
Moses settled first in Malibu. “It was right on the water. I used to commute to my Venice studio,” he says. “In New York I would go to Montauk. But you didn’t get the sense of infinite horizon that you get out here. There’s a point where the horizon connects with the sky. And sometimes it’s very well defined, but sometimes there’s a haze, a blur, and one thing begins to turn into another. I’m interested in that mirroring effect, of looking out into space, seeing one thing mirror another. You see it a lot in the desert, you see it a lot in the ocean.”
This got into his art. “The work shifted pretty quickly.” Moses says. “The very first ones I started doing were long and horizontal, mostly pearlescent white, and quite simple images.” He began keeping precise color notes. “I have an assistant who reads these charts and follows these tabulations,” he says. “We have thousands of pages going back years and years.”
He will begin a painting by figuring out the colors. Basing his choices on what?
“Things I’ve seen. Like things I’ve seen out in the natural world.” he says. The commutes on the Pacific Coast Highway have been a slipstream of visual event. “They are engrained on my memory. Then I focus on certain colors that might work together. What I’ll do is experiment on small paintings to see how much of these colors I should put in. It’s very interesting. Because reds and greens seem to expand, the blues seem to contract. So I have an idea what I’m going to do. But either they follow what I’m trying to get at or they don’t. And what’s cool is there is a certain amount of control but I also have to react to a situation in the moment.”
Accident being crucial.
“It’s a brand-new experience every single time,” Moses says “And that’s what makes it exciting. I don’t know what the end is going to be. I have to discover it as the paint is flowing. And react. And the paint reacts to what I do. And I react to what it does.”
He uses a dozen buckets, holding a couple of quarts of paint apiece, on each canvas. “I’ll walk around and pour in from one side and pour in from another side,” Moses says. “Everything is moving towards the center. And if I lift the painting up as it’s moving, everything will run the other way. So it is this juggling act of trying to get the sensation of everything moving towards the center. But at the same time there is a lot of circular movement that is happening.
“And other lines will be pushed by other buckets of paint. They will start to recede and come forward, which creates a three dimensional aspect. So I really never know what a painting is going to look like until it’s finished. Each one begins and ends in its own way. And there’s a million possibilities every time. And at a certain point I have to let go. And say that’s it!
“Once the color is down and the surface is all wet I can work on it for a couple of hours. It’s an intensely focused period of time. And the painting has to be done in one sitting every single time. It’s always done in a day. And it’s a long day.”
The sheer size of today’s’ art world, including the number of working artists, means that a walk-through of galleries in any art capital will reveal an acreage of beautifully-made work, sometimes described as “zombie formalism” or “crapstraction”, so that it’s almost jarring to confront the real thing. Andy Moses is not alone there – Hello, Sean Scully – but there he is, a figure in what has been described as a new Pictorialism.
“I do think it’s that,” Moses says. “Pictorialism is very much about
how things come into being. It is about energy and light turning into
matter”
Abstraction can be just that, I observed. Abstract. But abstraction
can also depict life, if not in forms with which we are familiar.
“I think so,” Moses said. “Somehow we are familiar with it and
Somehow we’re not. And I’m really trying to focus on that, the
essential force that’s all around us. I think it’s the emergence of how
we perceive images and how images come into being. And how
energy creates things – light and motion and movement. I really
want the energy of these to be the energy of the earth, the world.
Everything is dynamic, everything is changing, everything is
moving, everything is shifting ... and everything has that dynamic
aspect. You can see the world. And that it’s alive.” WM
Andy Moses: RECENT WORKS - Digital Catalog Now Available
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William Turner Gallery is pleased to present the digital catalog for Recent Works, an expansive new series of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Andy Moses. This extensive presentation marks the artist’s first solo exhibition since his highly acclaimed 30 Year Survey exhibition in 2017 at the Santa Monica College Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery.
Andy Moses: Recent Works presents an artist fully engaged and at the height of his creative process, showcasing perhaps his most ambitious and diverse body of work to date. Implementing techniques that utilize the artist’s almost obsessive study of the alchemical properties of paint, Moses’s work blurs the line between abstraction and a new kind of pictorialism…
A hard copy of the catalog will be available at the gallery. To receive a copy of the catalog by mail please email at turnergallery@gmail.com.
Amanda Quinn Olivar speaks with Andy Moses for CURATOR
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Andy Moses & Geomorphology 1707, photograph courtesy Alan Shaffer
AMANDA QUINN OLIVAR: I remember going to one of your earliest LA exhibits, with the rock paintings. When were you first inspired by nature? Has your art continued to revolve around it?
ANDY MOSES: Nature continues to be my first and main source for inspiration in my painting. I have always been interested in trying to capture that feeling of being alive. When you immerse yourself in nature you feel alive. The rock paintings you mention are from a show I had in 1988 at Asher Faure Gallery. Brian Butler, who now owns gallery 1301PE, was actually their director at that time, at Betty and Patty’s space on Almont Street. Your mother and father, Joan and Jack, actually bought two rock paintings before that exhibition in either 1986 or 1987.
AQO: Have other themes resonated throughout your career? Talk about the importance of form, energy and structure…
AM: Those are all great questions. Form, energy, and structure are what my work is very much about. I feel that form is essential to all painting. You create form in some sense within the picture field, but I’m also interested in the overall form or structure of what a painting of mine is and how that relates to form in general. In this recent exhibition at William Turner Gallery, each painting is one of three geometric forms: circular (which I refer to as tondos), hexagonal, or concave rectangles. In the tondos and hexagons, the form is emerging out of the center and the exterior form is defined by that emergence from the center. The panoramas are different. The overall composition is a little more conventional in that it is describing a pictorial landscape, or as I like to think of them, earthscapes. The earthscape being a little less like traditional landscape forms and a little more like an imagined form of some part of the earth. I am interested in this dance between pure abstraction and the suggestion of forms from the natural world. These concave curved rectangles come out of gestural abstraction but they do become pictorial, but of something that is in motion...
Andy Moses: Recent Works - A short film by EMS
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Andy Moses: RECENT WORKS - A short video about the exhibition from EMS - Photograph courtesy Alan Shaffer Photography
LA WEEKLY ARTS CALENDAR (HOMEWARD BOUND
/LA WEEKLY ARTS CALENDAR (HOMEWARD BOUND)
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Andy Moses: Recent Works opens this Saturday 12-7pm
/SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5 - 12-7PM - Appointments (and masks) Required
William Turner Gallery invites you to join us Saturday, December 5 from 12-7PM for an all-day, open house viewing of the exhibition. APPOINTMENTS ARE REQUIRED for this all day event. Social distancing guidelines will be strictly adhered to, and masks will be required for entry to the gallery and no more than 10 people will be admitted to the gallery at a time. Please follow the appointments link to make a reservation for December 5, or any date throughout the duration of the exhibit.
Nocturne 1502, 2020, acrylic on canvas over concave wood panel, 54"x84"x4.5
ANDY MOSES Recent Works Santa Monica, CA– William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Recent Works, an expansive new series of paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Andy Moses. This extensive presentation marks the artist’s first solo exhibition since his highly acclaimed 30 Year Survey exhibition in 2017 at the Santa Monica College Pete and Susan Barrett Art Gallery. Andy Moses: Recent Works presents an artist fully engaged and at the height of his creative process, showcasing perhaps his most ambitious and diverse body of work to date. Implementing techniques that utilize the artist’s almost obsessive study of the alchemical properties of paint, Moses’s work blurs the line between abstraction and a new kind of pictorialism.
The images reveal undeniable traces of natural phenomena, seeking not to replicate the natural world, but rather to suggest the forces of nature itself. His complex process of mixing and pouring paints conveys a sense of undulating energies pushing and pulling within the rectilinear, circular and hexagonal forms of the canvases themselves.
The paintings are sweeping and luminescent, their lustrous surfaces seemingly executed with an impossible combination of absolute precision and wild improvisation. Meandering lines of psychedelic chroma oscillate between near digital sharpness and dissolving washes of color, achieving works of captivating presence.
Geodynamics 1704, acrylic on canvas over hexigonal shaped wood panel, 78"x67"
Speaking about his work, Moses says, “I want the work to stop you in your tracks, to shake you out of your head and into the moment, into the present, where you can become receptive to a more meditative experience that hopefully begins to attune you to the transcendent beauty of the natural world.” As evidenced with his 30 Year Survey, Moses has long been fascinated with the forces of nature, both micro and macro, geologic and galactic. This new series expands on these themes magnificently.
Born in Los Angeles in 1962, Andy Moses attended the legendary CalArts, studying with John Baldessari, Michael Asher and Barbara Kruger. In 1982, Moses moved to New York where he worked as a studio assistant to Pat Steir. He quickly became part of the nascent 80s art scene, and became one of the youngest artists to exhibit with Annina Nosei gallery after Jean-Michael Basquitat. During that time he developed close ties with then emerging artists like Jeff Koons, Marilyn Minter, Rudolf Stingel and Christopher Wool. Moses returned to California in 2000, and really began to refine his explorations into the physical properties of paint that have brought him to the attention of museums and major collectors alike.
His work is included in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. He currently lives and works in Venice, CA.
THE ARGONAUT REVIEWS BLACK MADONNA
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By Bridgette M. Redman
Last day to see Black Madonna - 84 Page fully illustrated catalog now available.
/Please come see us at or before 5pm today for the last viewing of Black Madonna. 84-page fully illustrated catalog is now available at the gallery or for mail order. Please contact William Turner Gallery to order your copy.
Artillery Reviews Mark Steven Greenfield: Black Madonna
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ARTILLERY MAGAZINE Reviews MarK Steven Greenfield’s exhibition Black Madonna
Read MoreFowler Museum at UCLA - A Global Destination for Art: Mark Steven Greenfield
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Join us on Zoom as we visit with artists creating in our City of Angels
About this Event
RSVP to receive link to join as the date nears.
Mark Steven Greenfield, a native of LA, uses his art to explore the African-American experience, critiquing and offering unique perspectives on a society still grappling with the consequences of slavery and racial injustice. His newest body of work consists of 17 “Black Madonna” paintings that re-imagine Medieval religious icons rendered in the Byzantine style of their art historical predecessors. Greenfield places Black bodies in a place of exaltation, offering an imagined time that is hard to pinpoint, but during which white supremacy suffers the same vicious deaths that have historically been forced upon Black bodies.
Join Mark and Naima J. Keith for an exhibition walk-through at William Turner Gallery, followed by a conversation and Q&A
Mark Steven Greenfield studied with Charles White at Otis Art Institute; received his Bachelor’s degree in Art Education in 1973 from California State University, Long Beach; and an M.F.A. in painting and drawing from California State University, Los Angeles in 1987. Greenfield’s work has been exhibited extensively in the United States, including in a comprehensive survey exhibition at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles in 2014. From 1993-2011, Greenfield worked for the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs as Director of the Watts Towers Arts Center; later, he served as Director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park. He currently teaches drawing and design at Los Angeles City College, and serves on the board of Side Street Projects.
Naima J. Keith is Vice President of Education and Public Programs at LACMA. Previously, she was the Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the California African American Museum, where she guided the curatorial and education departments as well as marketing and communications; she was an Associate Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2011–16); and held a curatorial position at the Hammer Museum. Keith has lectured extensively and her essays have appeared in numerous publications. She holds degrees from Spelman College and UCLA, and is a proud native of Los Angeles.
This program is generously supported by a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
A Global Destination for Art: Artists from all over the world flock to work in Los Angeles, drawn by the energy of ingenuity and the space for experimental expression. Join us on Zoom as we visit with artists creating in our City of Angels.
INCONVERSATION - Mark Steven Greenfield: BLACK MADONNA
/William Turner speaks with Mark Steven Greenfield about his groundbreaking exhibit, Black Madonna
OPENING NEXT SATURDAY - BLACK MADONNA - MARK STEVEN GREENFIELD
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Collateral, 2020, Gold Leaf and Acrylic on Wood Panel, 30" X 56”
"For the faithful, the Black Madonnas represent the basis of theological mystery from which all possibility emanates. For the clergy, they provide cover for some unexplained religious dogma. For me, they held all the intrigue of confronting a blank canvas.” — Mark Steven Greenfield
BLACK MADONNA
MARK STEVEN GREENFIELD
OPENING NEXT SATURDAY
We will be open from 11-7 next Saturday for an all day opening reception in full compliance with CDC-recommendations and social distancing protocol.
We look forward to welcoming you to view the exhibition virtually and by appointment from September 19 - November 28, abiding by all of the CDC-recommended precautions.
BOOK AN APPOINTMENT
William Turner Gallery is pleased to present, Black Madonna, an exhibition of new and recent work by Mark Steven Greenfield. The exhibition explores aspects of the African American experience in American culture, often critiquing and offering unique perspectives on a society still grappling with the consequences of slavery and racial injustice. As Greenfield has stated, “My work incorporates irony, humor, tragedy, pathos, history, and a myriad of other tools, to challenge long-held notions of race in a different way."
The exhibition highlights a striking new series of 17 Black Madonna paintings, which re-imagine these unique religious icons, that began appearing in the 13th and 14th centuries in churches throughout Medieval Europe. The origin and purpose of the Black Madonnas in religious iconography are somewhat of a mystery and the subject of much scholarly debate, which inspired Greenfield to infuse them with his own contemporary meaning and perspective.
Mississippi Cookout, 2018, Gold Leaf & Acrylic on Wood Panel, 24”x18”
Greenfield's versions are rendered in the Byzantine style of their art historical predecessors, with the black Virgin Mother and Baby Jesus as the central focus within circular compositions, or tondos. These tondos float amongst abstract discs, set within fields of lustrous, gold leaf. The Madonnas predominate before a variety of backgrounds, which were traditionally innocuous. Greenfield, however, presents these backdrops as various revenge fantasies, where white supremacists are cast in the role of victims, suffering the fates they often inflicted.
The effect is striking, the meaning unexpected. For Greenfield, a dedicated meditator, the discs symbolize the mantras one repeats during meditation, and often appear in his work. The Black Madonnas, seated innocently before the violence playing out behind, are the thoughts which come unbidden during meditation between mantras - to be acknowledged, then released. The Madonnas play their traditional role, conveying notions of maternal love, seemingly oblivious to these various scenes of retribution, where the rope is decidedly on the other neck. Yet these role reversals are less about revenge fantasies and more about creating contexts for shifts in perspective - for empathy. Tinged with humor, titles like, Mississippi Cookout, and Burnin’ Down the House, invite us to imagine an alternate reality, so that we might better understand the brutal realities of the past as we navigate our way forward. As Greenfield states, “Fear of the “other” often devolves into mindless hatred. Yet, sometimes the path to empathy lies in the visualization of one’s physical victimization—particularly when paired with a symbol that has come to be associated with universal love.” He adds, “The revenge fantasy exists in the darker regions of the subconscious in response to centuries of injustice. It is subdued by the higher aspiration that leads toward a more saintly life. As during the Renaissance, when Black Madonnas first gained prominence, they serve as metaphors for a spectrum of new beginnings.”
Throughout his career, Greenfield's work has dealt with elucidating the African American experience - examining stereotypes and other acts of oppression, often by illuminating the most oppressive of acts - those of omission. Pieces like Escrava Anastacia , and Zong , are among a number of new works in the exhibition that present us with powerful images of figures and events neglected by history. Greenfield's images of a muzzled Anastacia, a legendary South American slave, known for her exceptional beauty and miraculous powers of healing, and the ill-fated souls cast to oblivion from the slave ship Zong, compel us to learn their stories.
This exhibition was a year and a half in the planning, yet feels uncannily destined for this moment. It opens at a time of unprecedented upheaval, where a global pandemic and outrage over continuing racial inequality, have challenged our institutions, and our perceptions of them, to the core. With Black Madonna , Mark Steven Greenfield brings an important and timely perspective to the discussion.
We look forward to welcoming you to view the exhibition virtually and by appointment, abiding by all of the CDC-recommended precautions.
