Hegemann Wedge
On View at the Getty Center: Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970
Hegemann Wedge is one of a group of works that Ed Moses produced in the early 1970s using polyester resin poured onto canvas. Moses added colored bands to the canvas using snap lines, before laying the canvas on a horizontal table and pouring liquid resin over the top of it. As the resin cured and dried, it formed a semi-translucent frame around the edge of the canvas. The diagonal weave pattern in this work was inspired in part by the Navajo blankets illustrated in a book given to him by artist Tony Berlant. The resin paintings were also, Moses explains, “a sort of thumb to the plastic scene.” At a time when many of his peers were making immaculately polished polyester works, the uneven surfaces and ragged edges of Hegemann Wedge, and the imperfections caused by pooling and seeping resin, point to Moses’s interest in process rather than finished product.