Last Chance: Moses@100 Closes This Saturday!

Tomorrow is the last day to see Moses@100, William Turner Gallery’s ongoing exhibition commemorating the centennial of artist Ed Moses. Moses was instrumental to the establishment of Los Angeles as a hub of contemporary art – in his review of Moses@100, art critic Edward Goldman writes, “It is impossible to think of the history of the Los Angeles art scene without discussing Ed Moses (1926-2018).” Come see the exhibition this weekend before it’s gone!

Ed Moses was the subject of a major retrospective at MOCA Los Angeles in 1996, and in 2014 he showed at University of California Irvine where he had taught in the seventies. On the occasion of his 2015 drawing show at LACMA of works from the 1960s and 70s, organized by Leslie Jones, director Michael Govan commented, “Ed Moses has been central to the history of art making in Los Angeles for more than half a century.” That exhibition included more than 40 drawings promised to the museum by the artist.

Moses’ work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Curtis Ripley: High Fidelity Opening

Santa Monica, CA - William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Curtis Ripley: High Fidelity, an exhibition of new paintings by Curtis Ripley opening April 25, 5-8 PM, and on view through June 20, 2026. The exhibition unfolds as a visual composition: lyrical, atmospheric, and finely attuned to the rhythms of perception.

In Ripley’s paintings, glimmers of paint flicker and flare across darkened grounds, activating the surface with a sense of movement and light. Gestural curls and swirls interact with lines and dashes that guide the viewer’s eye in a choreographed passage across the picture plane. These marks are not merely expressive—they are structural, establishing a sense of tempo and poetic cadence that gives each work its internal coherence.

Forms in Ripley’s work do not resolve immediately. They hover, coalesce, and dissolve, shifting in and out of focus as the viewer’s attention lingers. Color behaves similarly: shapes emerge from the ground only to recede again, creating a continuous interplay between presence and disappearance.

Curtis Ripley, Dreaming in Color, 2026, oil on canvas, 40 x 30”.

The result is a dynamic tension between flatness and depth that remains deliberately unsettled. This instability gives rise to a pronounced sense of atmosphere. Gestural forms drift across layered fields of tone, while Ripley’s palette moves between moments of luminous intensity and expanses of saturated darkness. Subtle gradations of color produce fleeting effects — recalling distant light, reflective shimmer, or the charged stillness of a landscape at dusk. The paintings unfold perceptually, revealing themselves over time rather than at a glance.

Ripley’s practice occupies a space between the gestural immediacy of Abstract Expressionism and the immersive chromatic sensibility of Color Field painting. His work synthesizes these traditions into a contemporary language grounded in process, layering, and revision. While resonant with historical explorations of light and atmosphere, his paintings remain distinctly present—open-ended, responsive, and experiential.

Curtis ripley, Silver Springs, 2026, oil on canvas, 60” x 48

Presented concurrently with Unrepentant Beauty by Roland Reiss, High Fidelity offers a complementary approach to perception—one grounded not in constructed illusion, but in painterly sensation and temporal experience.

Throughout a career spanning more than four decades, Curtis Ripley has exhibited nationally and internationally, with an extensive record of solo exhibitions. Born in Lubbock, Texas in 1949, he received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1975.

Roland Reiss: Unrepentant Beauty Opening

Santa Monica, CA  - William Turner Gallery is pleased to present Roland Reiss: Unrepentant Beauty, an exhibition of late paintings by Roland Reiss (1929–2020), opening April 25, 5-8PM and on view through June 20, 2026.

A pioneering figure in postwar American art, Reiss spent more than six decades redefining the possibilities of painting. From his early explorations of abstraction and representation to his groundbreaking sculptural works and miniature environments, his practice consistently expanded the boundaries of the medium.

This exhibition focuses on a remarkable development in his final decades: a series of vibrant, dynamic flower paintings that challenge long-standing assumptions about beauty and subject matter in contemporary art. Historically regarded as decorative or peripheral, the motif of the flower becomes, in Reiss’ hands, a site of formal and conceptual innovation. The artist approached these works with full awareness of their cultural baggage, describing the act of painting flowers as requiring “a leap of faith.”

About these paintings Reiss stated, “Flowers are the vehicle for putting everything I have learned about painting into my work.” The resulting paintings move fluidly between abstraction and figuration, combining bold color, gestural energy, and spatial complexity. Rather than depicting flowers, Reiss uses them as a framework for exploring perception, materiality, and the enduring power of visual experience.

The title Unrepentant Beauty reflects the artist’s unapologetic embrace of beauty as both subject and strategy. In contrast to earlier generations for whom beauty was often viewed with suspicion, Reiss’ late work asserts its relevance with clarity and conviction.

At the end of a long and influential career, Reiss produced a body of work that is at once playful, rigorous, and deeply resonant—offering a powerful reconsideration of what painting can be.

Roland Reiss studied at the American Academy of Art, Mount San Antonio College and at UCLA. He taught at UCLA, the University of Colorado, and Claremont Graduate University, where he served as Chair for 30 years, from 1971 to 2001. In 2009 he received the College Art Association Award for the Distinguished Teaching of Art. At CGU he held the Benezet Chair in the Humanities and in 2010 an endowed chair in art was established in his name. He was also the director of The Painting's Edge residency at Idyllwild Arts.

Reiss was the recipient of four N.E.A. grants and of numerous prizes and awards. His work is included in many important public and private collections, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Hammer Museum, among others.