‘Whiplines, Waterfalls and Worms’, Ed Moses

One day, in the summer of 1970, as Ed Moses and Riko Mizuno stood talking about his upcoming second exhibition at her gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, the diminutive Japanese gallerist described the repair work that needed to be done to the building's roof. When he heard this, Moses made a decision that would not only become part of the folklore of Los Angeles art but would have a profound influence on the future direction of his work. Turning to Mizuno, Moses said that for his next show he wanted to take out the gallery ceiling and remove part of the roof. The only thing present in the gallery, apart from some rolls of canvas at the entrance and large unpainted panels on the walls and floor, would be the daylight falling through the exposed rafters into the space below.

This was not a surprising move. For the 44-year-old artist, who until then had largely been known for his semi abstract 'boudoir' paintings and obsessively worked graphite drawings, was also fascinated by Architecture. In the mid-1960's Moses had taken time away from the studio to renovate and rebuild a house on Mabery Rd, Santa Monica. But as he reconfigured the building's original layout, what had started out as an architectural project turned into something more artistic, as he pursued his intuitive creative urges as much as any pre-existing plans. On a whim he had punched openings through newly constructed walls to make windows, changed layouts and introduced new elements even when everything seemed apparently finished. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Moses had his first exhibition with Mizuno in 1969, he had presented a series of 'pop-up' prints whose three-dimensional geometric forms had clear architectural references, and now, as he pulled up the tar paper on the roof and exposed the rafters to the daylight and the viewer's gaze, he seemed to be translating this fascination with architectural structures onto the grand scale.