Palm Springs Official Guide to Palm Springs, California
Get ready for the seventh edition of Art Palm Springs—February 15 – 19, 2018!
Art Palm Springs is the premier art fair in the Southwest presenting post-war and contemporary art. The seventh annual edition will bring nearly 80 galleries from Asia, North and South America, and Europe, that represent more than 300 artists, and brings a world of art to the Palm Springs Convention Center. The increasingly popular fair has more than doubled the number of attending galleries since launching from just over 30 in 2013 to over 60 in 2017, drawing thousands of art buyers and fans to the fair each year. The fair is strategically scheduled over the extended President’s Day Weekend coinciding with Palm Springs Modernism Week at the height of the Coachella Valley’s season.
Due to popular demand by our ever-expanding audience and galleries, the fair announces the addition of President’s Day – Monday, February 19 – to the show’s schedule.
Both returning and new galleries will exhibit at Art Palm Springs, including but not limited to Adamar Fine Arts, Addison Rowe Fine Art, C. Grimaldis Gallery, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Chiaroscuro/Gebert Contemporary, Chimento Contemporary, David Klein Gallery, Edward Cella Art & Arcitecture, Heller Gallery, Hohmann, J. Willott Gallery, Jane Kahan Gallery, Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, LewAllen Galleries, Melissa Morgan Fine Art, Michael Solway LLC, Nancy Hoffmann Gallery, Peter Blake Gallery, Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, Timothy Yarger Fine Art, Vincent Vallarino Fine Art, William Turner Gallery. The participating galleries will present paintings, photography and sculpture from the post-war and contemporary era.
If You Go:
Opening Night Preview
Thursday, February 15 from 5-9pm
VIP Ticket Holders Only
A benefit for the Palm Springs Art Museum
General Admission
Friday, February 16 | 11am-7pm | All Ticket Holders
Saturday, February 17 | 11am-7pm | All Ticket Holders
Sunday, February 18 | 11am-6pm | All Ticket Holders
Monday, February 19 | 11am-5pm | All Ticket Holders
Location
Palm Springs Convention Center
277 N Avenida Caballeros
Palm Springs CA 92262
Info & Tickets
Art Palm Springs 2018 Artists of the Year
The 2018 honorees are pioneering California artist Ed Moses, represented by William Turner Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, Calif., and Andy Moses presented by Melissa Morgan Gallery in Palm Desert, California. The duo join the ranks of Art Palm Springs’ Artist of the Year impressive list of Post War and Contemporary honorees including Judy Chicago, Mel Ramos, Jennifer Bartlett, Fletcher Benton, Larry Bell, and Lita Albuquerque.
“This year is a first to have the opportunity to honor both Ed and Andy Moses as Artists of the Year,” said Donna Davies, Vice President of the Art Group for Urban Expositions, producer of Art Palm Springs. “Their combined work to date has been a tremendous influence for more than seven decades. We are incredibly honored to include them both this year.” Ed Moses, the abstract painter and self-described “mutator” with an insatiable need to create, is a member of an elite set of artists that were part of L.A.’s scene-shaping Ferus Gallery in the 1950s and ’60s.
Born on an ocean liner headed to Long Beach, Calif., from Hawaii in 1931, Ed Moses had wanted to be a doctor, not an artist. After serving as a surgical tech during World War II, he entered Long Beach City College’s pre-med course, but dropped out, saying “I was too dumb, I couldn’t memorize things” in a 2016 interview published in the Los Angeles Times.
Taking an art class with painter Pedro Miller changed Moses’ life. He entered UCLA’s art program and met artist Craig Kauffman who then introduced him to Walter Hopps owner of the influential Ferus Gallery, in turn the site of Moses’ graduate one-man show in 1958.
It was at Ferus that Moses became a member of the raucous art scene that included Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Edward Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, John Altoon and Wallace Berman, or the Cool School of artists who pushed the boundaries of Post War art.
Moses has noted that his life and art are “about exploring the phenomenal world.” Unlike many of his contemporaries from the ‘60s and ‘70s who worked in conceptual, Pop Art (Ruscha), Light and Space (Bell) and assemblage, Moses never embraced any single art movement. Rather, Moses continued to experiment. Without the imposition of any particular preconceived concept for his work, he opened himself up to the “happy accidents” that occur when facing a blank canvas. The act of the creation of a piece, along with the interaction of the applying paint or other media to a base material is the artistic process in its purest form.
Newer works are displayed in two viewing studios on the Venice property with space for the enormous, craquelure paintings created in the last several years. Covering the 6 to 8-foot canvases in black or white paint and a secret “sauce” that he allows to dry before slamming a fist or elbow onto the surface to create the splits and cracks that he finishes by rolling paint over the shattered surface. The technique, discovered by accidentally falling onto a canvas, creates fissures reminiscent of flower petals and the artist’s rose drawings of the 1960s.Now in his 90s, after bouts with cancer and heart surgery, Moses shows no sign of slowing down. He still creates one to 20 works each day. In 2016, Moses created more than 50 works for a survey exhibition at William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica. “Moses @ 90” filled the Bergamot Station gallery and a former adjacent Santa Monica Museum of Art space with paintings and works on paper from the ’50s to 2016, with many works that had never been seen in public before.
Then there are the panels that feature aluminum coated in plastic that distort reflections with their wavy surfaces, what Moses calls his “Lewis Carroll-style.”
Other recent works include acrylic on canvas that emit the energy and emotional imprint of the moment of creation. Splatters, drizzles and patchworks of color created using brushes, rollers and sponges in an erratic, Jackson Pollock-like manner. “These paintings are ways that I can act out a thought or feeling — terror, misery, death,” he has said of his methods and work.
