For its first showing at UNTITLED. Albertz Benda will present a selection of early work by Bill Beckley and Ed Moses, juxtaposing two artists who played integral roles in the New York City and Los Angeles art movements of the 1970s and have been significant influences on decades of artists to follow. Bill Beckley, a pioneer of Narrative Art, was a staple of the 1970s SoHo art scene, while Ed Moses, experimenting with new processes, emerged in the late 1950s as a leading member of the generation of artists who helped turn Los Angeles into the creative hub it is today. For the booth at UNTITLED., both artists have contributed rare works from their personal archives.
Bill Beckley’s early work is a response to the dominance of Minimalism, encompassing a wide array of mediums full of shifting meanings. Beckley was inspired by his involvement with 112 Greene Street, a gallery-as-laboratory where Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others, worked in a state of creative anarchy. For UNTITLED., Albertz Benda has assembled a carefully curated selection of performance documentation, watercolors, and studies for his best-known work, as well as one of the artist’s iconic Narrative works composed of typed fictions and framed photographs.
A member of the West Coast’s ‘Cool School,’ Ed Moses never limited himself to a signature technique or medium. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Moses developed various modes of expression grounded in materiality of the surface and experimentation with application. Fascinated by the balance between order and volatility, the artist employed unpredictable materials that ultimately reduced his control over the final composition. The resulting grid paintings on view at UNTITLED. affirm the physicality of painting while evoking insubstantiality and flux.
2015 has been an important year for both Beckley and Moses, as major museums are once again celebrating their work; Beckley’s photographs were recently included in the exhibition Art on Camera: Photographs by Shunk-Kender 1960-1971 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, while Moses was the focus of a major retrospective Ed Moses: Drawings of the 1960s and 70s at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
