Location Laguna Art Museum is located at 307 Cliff Drive in Laguna Beach, on the corner of Coast Highway and Cliff Drive.
Join renowned abstract painter Andy Moses in conversation with curator Peter Frank for an engaging discussion of Moses’s expansive career, creative process and evolving investigations of perception, light and space. Moderated by art critic Shana Nys Dambrot, the program offers critical insight into Moses’s work within the context of Southern California abstraction and contemporary painting today.
4:30 pm Reception
5:30 pm Program
Advance tickets recommended.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Andy Moses (1962, Los Angeles) is an abstract painter in the circle of artists, experimental and otherwise, who have made the Venice district a locus of artistic activity in Los Angeles. As such, Moses is obliquely associated with the Southern California Light & Space movement, specifically with its second generation. But his relationship to such Venice-connected Light & Space artists resembles that of his late father, Ed Moses: at the center of his peer group but distant from most of its practices.
Andy Moses was trained at the California Institute of the Arts, but decamped to New York after graduating, He lived and worked back east for almost two decades. Soon after moving, Moses created the painting process that he would shape and refine into the signature style he still practices today. It engages a process of mixing, pouring, and layering luminous, even pearlescent paints, of pushing the physical properties of paint through chemical reactions, viscosity interference, and gravity dispersion so that the resulting images and visual expanses are read simultaneously as abstract fields and as representations of deeply recessive spaces, somewhere between earthly landscapes and cosmic cascades dropping through the firmament. Upon moving back home Moses realized that the gently eerie immanence he sought and still seeks in his painting manifested naturally in the coastal light of his native region, a light he had grown up basking in and absorbing almost unconsciously.
A quarter-century ago, having devised his method far from his birthplace, Andy Moses brought it home. The current exhibition draws from Moses’s work since his return from New York. It surveys the refinement of his technique in response to his deliberate embrace of southern California coastal light upon his homecoming, and how he employs his techniques in a unique fashion that at once reflects and evades the principles of California Light & Space – fitting Instead into a broader concept, Perceptualism.
Peter Frank is an American art critic, curator, editor, and poet based in Los Angeles. He earned both his B.A. and M.A. in art history from Columbia University before beginning a distinguished career writing and curating in the contemporary art world.
Frank has been a prolific contributor to major art publications and served in editorial roles for THEmagazine Los Angeles and Vision Art Quarterly. He has also been an art critic for outlets including LA Weekly, Angeleno Magazine, The Village Voice, and The SoHo Weekly News, and he’s contributed widely to international periodicals such as Huffington Post and Fabrik magazine.
As a curator, Frank organized numerous exhibitions for major institutions worldwide – including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Documenta in Kassel, the Venice Biennale, and Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. He also served as Senior Curator at the Riverside Art Museum in California and has mounted thematic and survey shows throughout the United States and Europe.
In addition to his curatorial work, Frank has written monographs, exhibition catalogues and several books on art and artistic movement. He has taught and lectured on contemporary art at numerous colleges and universities across North America and Europe.
Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown Los Angeles. A contributor to the Village Voice, Flaunt, Artillery, and other culture publications, she was the Arts Editor at LA Weekly until 2024. In May 2024, she launched 13ThingsLA on Substack, a weekly curated calendar of reviews and recommendations for the LA art world, presented by Hijinx Arts.
She studied Art History at Vassar College, writes book and catalog essays, curates and juries exhibitions, is a dedicated Instagram photographer, and is the author of the experimental novella Zen Psychosis (2020, Griffith Moon). She speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions nationally, and is a recipient of the Rabkin Foundation Art Writing Prize, the MOZAK Future Art Writers Grant, and the LA Press Club National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Critic of the Year Award.