Established by Tim Blum and Jeff Poe in 1994, Blum & Poe is a contemporary art gallery promoting Los Angeles artists alongside several established and emerging international names. Blum & Poe also maintains a longstanding reputation for its part in introducing Japanese and Korean post-war art to an American audience.
Read MoreFounded in Santa Monica, Blum & Poe now operates between three cities. Moving to a warehouse space on the outskirts of Culver City, in 2003, the gallery became the catalyst for Culver City’s Art District as other galleries were drawn to La Cienega Boulevard. After expanding the Culver City space, 2014 saw Blum & Poe galleries established in New York and Tokyo.
Although the gallery’s 25-year relationship with Takashi Murakami that saw his first solo show in Los Angeles is a defining part of the gallery’s story, Blum & Poe has worked with a broad range of artists and currently represents close to 50. Among them are established international names such as Anya Gallaccio, Yoshitomo Nara, Lee Ufan, and the late Karel Appel. In 2014 Blum & Poe held the first solo exhibition of Appel’s work in New York in more than 40 years, bolstering a renewed interest in the Dutch painter and former member of the CoBrA group. Responding to the contemporary relevance of Appel shown in the exhibition Alex Kitnick wrote in ArtForum, ‘Appel's work bears witness to an earlier moment of post-human possibility and, given the intense interest in the inhuman paces to which the body is subjected today, feels intriguingly relevant.’
Additionally, the gallery also promotes emerging artists both home-grown and hailing from overseas; for example, Mohamed Bourouissa, the Paris-based Algerian multimedia artist documenting life on the margins, and Pia Camil the Mexican maker of visibly hand-crafted paintings, sculpture and participatory installations exploring commercialisation, abstraction and the Mexican cultural landscape in the same breath. The gallery ushered in rapper Kanye West’s foray into art with the provocative exhibition FAMOUS (Los Angeles, 2016), which included hyper-realistic, life-size wax works of a host of celebrities depicted naked and sharing a bed. Popular Japanese DJ and artist EYƎ also participated in recent group exhibitions such as Vong Co RAHZI (Tokyo, 2019), showcasing his Kinesthetic DJ style alongside some of his album art for Japanese noise rock band the Boredoms, and more recent drawings and collages.
Blum & Poe celebrated its 25-year anniversary in 2019 with a two-part exhibition titled Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s. Curated by Mika Yoshitake, the exhibition explored the youth-dominated art scene of the punkish 1980s and 1990s between Mono-ha and Neo-Pop, demonstrating the pivotal influence of this period on contemporary art today. It highlighted the gallery’s niche expertise on this subject in the American art scene. Previously in 2012 Blum and Poe introduced the Mono-ha art movement to a US audience with the survey show Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha.
Blum & Poe annually participate in key international art fairs including the Los Angeles, Tokyo, San Francisco, and New York Art Book Fairs; Art Basel, Frieze, FOG Design+Art, and FIAC. The gallery spaces also regularly host artists talks, lectures, screenings, and performances.
Exhibition view: Kenjirō Okazaki, TOPICA PICTUS / La Cienega, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (17 July–14 August 2021). © Kenjirō Okazaki. Courtesy the artist, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo. Photo: Dan Finlayson.
Curated by Venus Lau, the section is dominated by Chinese new media artists.
Booths shared between Japanese and international galleries will be distributed in a seemingly random way, creating exhibition hall 'back alleys' for private discussions and deals.
The committee selects which galleries can join Ocula as members, ensuring only leading galleries appear on the site.
Ocula's editors select their picks from OVR: Pioneers, Art Basel's online platform featuring artists who have forged new trajectories in art.
Ocula Advisory present a selection of highlights on view in OVR: Portals—the first curator-led edition of Art Basel's Online Viewing Rooms.
Moving away from his signature greyscale, Tomoo Gokita employs sultry pastel colours in his latest works on view at Blum & Poe.
Asuka Anastacia Ogawa's paintings are rooted in wonderment.
The preteen and teenage years are both the most frivolous and the most intense periods of human experience. There is a primal, emotional understanding of urge, but the vocabulary and maturity to express it is often just out of reach.
Yanagi’s rusty cast-iron 1:50 scale model of the Imperial Japanese Navy ship Akitsushima, a seaplane tender sunk in 1945, looks properly absurd and forlorn on the floor in the middle of the room. Parts of the model are scattered around the hull 'ambivalently in a process of either construction or deconstruction,' the Blum & Poe website says....
In advance of Henry Taylor's exhibition at Blum and Poe, the artist met Laura Hoptman, Executive Director of the Drawing Center, at the Drawing Center on Wooster Street in Soho for a conversation. What follows is a condensed version of that discussion, which ranges from Taylor's childhood, to the importance of drawing in his practice, and how he...
A toxic beauty emanates from — or maybe infects — six impressive new landscape photographs and three abstractions by Florian Maier-Aichen. It's the sixth solo show at Blum & Poe by the German-born, L.A.-based artist, and it represents a milieu in which he has worked for more than a dozen years.
Anna Weyant's solo exhibition Loose Screw at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (23 March–1 May 2021).
Henry Taylor (1958, USA - Lives and works in Los Angeles)
On the occassion of Kwong Young-Woo's solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery K2, Seoul, as well as his participation in the Kabinett sector of Art Basel Hong Kong 2017, take a look at historical footage of the artist discussing his groundbreaking practice and process in a new video released by Kukje Gallery:
Hugh Scott-Douglas talks about his art practice
