BLUM is a contemporary art gallery located in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York.
Contents
- History
- Japanese artists
- Korean artists (Dansaekhwa)
- Artists
- Branches
- See also
- References
- External links
BLUM is a contemporary art gallery located in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York.
BLUM represents more than sixty artists and estates from sixteen countries worldwide, nurturing a diverse roster of artists at all stages of their practices with a range of global perspectives. Originally opened as Blum & Poe in Santa Monica in 1994, the gallery has been a pioneer in its early commitment to Los Angeles as an international arts capital.
The inaugural exhibition in Santa Monica featured Stroke, an installation by British artist Anya Gallaccio, consisting of chocolate smeared onto the gallery walls. [1]
In 2003, the gallery relocated to a 460 m2 (5,000 sq ft) warehouse on the edge of Culver City, [2] an area of industrial warehouses. Several other galleries subsequently opened on the same stretch of La Cienega Boulevard, resulting in the formation of the Culver City Art District. [3]
On its 15th anniversary in 2009, the gallery purchased a 2,000 m2 (22,000 sq ft) building across the street on La Cienega Boulevard and renovated it into a series of exhibition spaces on two floors.[ citation needed ]
In 2014, the gallery opened an exhibition space in a renovated townhouse at 19 East 66th Street, off Fifth Avenue, in New York. [4]
In 2020, Blum & Poe teamed up with art and design fair Object & Thing and Mendes Wood DM gallery to install works by 34 artists and designers – including Alma Allen, Sonia Gomes and Mark Grotjahn – throughout the glassy home of architect and industrial designer Eliot Noyes in New Canaan, Connecticut. [5] [6]
In 2023, Jeff Poe departed the gallery, leaving Tim Blum in charge of the business. At the same time, New York-based Partner Matt Bangser was promoted to managing partner, a newly-created position. [7] Despite initial indications that the gallery would retain the name "Blum & Poe," [8] the gallery, shortly thereafter, officially changed its name to BLUM and announced plans to relocate its New York outpost to a 580 m2 (6,200 sq ft) space in New York's Tribeca district. [9]
Prior to returning to Los Angeles in 1994, Blum had spent several years living and working in the Tokyo art world. During that time he met Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami. Blum and Poe visited Murakami's studio in Toyama to see his then newly created Oval Buddha (2007). The massive sculpture was funded through the efforts of the gallerists. [10] Following its opening in Santa Monica, Blum & Poe gave Yoshitomo Nara his first solo exhibition in the United States in 1995. Takashi Murakami’s first solo exhibition with the gallery was in 1997.[ citation needed ]
In January 2010, Blum & Poe held a solo exhibition of Lee Ufan, the influential Korean artist/theorist of Mono-ha, a loose group of Tokyo-based artists who established themselves in the late 1960s. In February 2012, the gallery held “Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha,” the first survey of Mono-ha in the United States, which included major installations by Kōji Enokura, Noriyuki Haraguchi, Susumu Koshimizu, Lee Ufan, Nobuo Sekine, Kishio Suga, Jiro Takamatsu, and Katsurō Yoshida. [11]
In February to May 2019, Blum & Poe Los Angeles hosted the two-part exhibition “Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s” curated by Mika Yoshitake, which presented the work of over twenty-five visual artists in an array of media spanning painting, sculpture, duration performance, noise, video, and photography. The exhibition title makes reference to the gallery in Tokyo (Gallery Parergon, 1981-1986) that introduced many artists associated with the New Wave phenomenon, its name attributed to Jacques Derrida’s essay from 1979 which questioned the “framework” of art, influential to artists and critics during the period. A catalogue was published alongside the exhibition by Blum & Poe and Skira Editore.
In June 2019, Blum & Poe opened "Vong Co RAHZI", a group exhibition inspired by the influential Japanese visual and music artist 'EYƎ'. [12] It featured a selection of works by EYƎ, known as a pioneer of the Japanese noise genre, and four artists influenced by him. One was Masaho Anotani, who uses his surreal and luminous artworks like a Shaman to communicate what is sacred. [13] There was also Teppei Kaneuji, who re-configures consumer goods for bizarre fantastical sculptures, and the painter of unusual and purposely unrealistic representations of memories, Chihiro Mori. [14] [15] The fourth artist was Tomoo Gokita, who presents cultural archetypes with warped and concealed features in grayscale, monochrome, abstract and figurative paintings and drawings. [16]
In 2021, Blum & Poe partnered with ANOMALY Gallery for the Art Collaboration Kyoto Art Fair, which sought to bridge the distance between the Japanese art scene and the art scene overseas. Artists featured were gathered under the theme society and labour. 'We share one artist, Yukinori Yanagi, but we thought the real pleasure would come from collaborating with artists the other gallery has never worked with before.' the gallery director at ANOMALY tells Ocula Magazine. [17] Tim Blum has served on the selection committee of Tokyo Gendai as part of a recent effort to forward the contemporary art market in Japan. [18]
Following the 2010 solo exhibition of Lee Ufan and the subsequent survey of Mono-ha in 2012, Blum & Poe expanded its exploration of the artistic contexts in which Lee Ufan worked. In parallel to his involvement with Mono-ha, Lee had been an influential figure to his peers in Korea, whose works were collectively referred to as Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting).
In September 2014, the gallery held "From All Sides: Tansaekhwa on Abstraction," curated by Joan Kee, Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Michigan, at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles. Featuring Lee and six other core artists from the movement — Chung Sang-Hwa (Chung Sanghwa), Ha Chonghyun, Kwon Young-woo, Park Seobo and Yun Hyong-keun — "From All Sides" was the first major survey of Dansaekhwa to be held in the United States. [19] Blum & Poe in New York subsequently held Ha Chong-hyun's first US solo show in November 2014, and Yun Hyong-keun's first posthumous US solo show in November 2015.
BLUM represents numerous living artists, including:
In addition, the gallery manages various artist estates, including:
In the past, the gallery has worked with the following artists and estates:
On its 20th anniversary in 2014, Blum & Poe established two new branches. In May, the gallery opened a gallery in a townhouse on the Upper East Side in New York. In September, Blum & Poe opened a space opposite the Meiji Shrine gardens in central Tokyo. [27] [28]
Takashi Murakami is a Japanese contemporary artist. He works in fine arts as well as commercial media and is known for blurring the line between high and low arts. His influential work draws from the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese artistic tradition and the nature of postwar Japanese culture. He designed the album covers for Kanye West's third studio album Graduation and West and Kid Cudi’s collaborative studio album Kids See Ghosts.
Yoshitomo Nara is a Japanese artist. He lives and works in Nasushiobara, Tochigi Prefecture, though his artwork has been exhibited worldwide. Nara has had nearly 40 solo exhibitions since 1984. His art work has been housed at the MoMA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). His most well-known and repeated subjects are "big-headed girls" with piercing eyes, who one Nara scholar describes as having "childlike expressions [that] resonate with adult emotions, [their] embodiment of kawaii (cuteness) carries a dark humor, and any explicit cultural references are intertwined with personal memories."
Aya Takano is a Japanese painter, Superflat artist, manga artist, and science fiction essayist. Aya Takano is represented by Kaikai Kiki, the artistic production studio created in 2001 by Takashi Murakami.
Shigeo Anzai was a Japanese photographer. A self-professed "art documentarist", Anzai is well-known for his prolific photographic documentation of artworks, exhibitions, and events of his time. He is also known for intimate portraits of popular modern and contemporary artists, which cast their subjects in an unexpected, unposed, and humanizing light. As Anzai noted for Artforum, he was interested in the "humanity" of his subjects, or the human being within the artist, rather than the artist within the human being. Anzai's style of portraiture stands in contrast to the popular modes of portrait photography of the time which monumentalized their subjects, as in the work of Hans Namuth. Anzai is known for his snapshots of artists such as Shuzo Takiguchi, Atsuko Tanaka, Yayoi Kusama, Tetsumi Kudo, Joseph Beuys, and Isamu Noguchi, among others.
Bryan Hunt is an American sculptor who was born in Terre Haute, Indiana on June 7, 1947. His family moved to Tampa, Florida in 1955. He worked at the Kennedy Space Center as an engineer's aide and draftsman, 1967–1968, during the NASA Apollo Program. In 1968, he moved to Los Angeles to enroll in the Otis Art Institute, where he received a BFA in 1971.
Lee Ufan is a Korean minimalist painter, sculptor, and academic, known for innovative bodies of work emphasizing process, materials, and the experiential engagement of viewer and site, and critiques of European phenomenology.
Park Seo-bo was a South Korean painter known for his "Écriture" series, involvement in the Korean Art Informel movement, and particular formal concerns around painting that have led critics and art historians to identify him as a leading Dansaekhwa artist.
Nobuo Sekine was a Japanese sculptor who resided in both Tokyo, Japan, and Los Angeles, California.
Mono-ha (もの派) is the name given to an art movement led by Japanese and Korean artists of 20th-century. The Mono-ha artists explored the encounter between natural and industrial materials, such as stone, steel plates, glass, light bulbs, cotton, sponge, paper, wood, wire, rope, leather, oil, and water, arranging them in mostly unaltered, ephemeral states. The works focus as much on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space as on the materials themselves.
Kishio Suga, is a Japanese sculptor and installation artist currently living in Itō, Shizuoka, Japan.
Kōji Enokura was a Japanese painter and installation artist.
Susumu Koshimizu is a Japanese sculptor and an installation artist.
Alexandra Munroe is an American curator, Asia scholar, and author focusing on art, culture, and institutional global strategy. She has produced over 40 exhibitions and published pioneering scholarship on modern and contemporary Asian art. She organized the first major North American retrospectives of artists Yayoi Kusama (1989), Daido Moriyama (1999), Yoko Ono (2000), Mu Xin (2001), Cai Guo-Qiang (2008), and Lee Ufan (2011), among others, and has brought such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, and Chinese conceptual art, as well as Japanese otaku culture, to international attention. Her project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Recently, Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which the New York Times named as one of 2017’s top ten exhibitions and ARTnews named as one of the decade’s top 25 most influential shows. Credited for the far-reaching impact of her exhibitions and scholarship bolstering knowledge of postwar Japanese art history in America and Japan, she received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan.
Chung Sanghwa is a South Korean minimalist and Dansaekhwa artist. After receiving his BFA from the College of Fine Arts in Seoul National University in 1956, Chung developed his unique grid-like painting style in Japan and France in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Coming from a generation of post-war South Korean artists, Chung's reductive process of painting consists of repetitive application and removal of the paint on canvas.
Dansaekhwa, often translated as "monochrome painting" from Korean, is a retroactive term grouping together disparate artworks that were exhibited in South Korea beginning in the mid 1970s. While the wide range of artists whose work critics and art historians consider to fall under this category are often exhibited together, they were never part of an official artistic movement nor produced a manifesto. Nonetheless, their artistic practices are seen to share "a commitment to thinking more intensively about the constituent elements of mark, line, frame, surface and space around which they understood the medium of painting." Their interests compose a diverse set of formal concerns that cannot be reduced to a preference for limited color palettes.
Yukinori Yanagi is a contemporary Japanese artist.
Yun Hyong-keun was a South Korean artist. After graduating from the Hongik University, Yun became associated with the Dansaekhwa movement. Yun is well known for the smearing effects of burnt umber and ultramarine blue paints on raw canvas or linen, which reveals a Korean sensibility of reflection and meditation.
Kim Tschang-yeul was a South Korean artist known for his abstract paintings of water droplets. He formed part of the Modern Artists' Association (현대미술가협회) in South Korea and joined the Art Informel movement of the 1950s and 60s. From the late 1960s, Kim Tschang-yeul presented works in international stages, studied in the United States, and eventually relocated to Paris in 1969, where he developed his signature water droplet paintings.
Ha Chong Hyun or Ha Chong-hyun is a South Korean artist. Today, through his Conjunction series (1974–present), Ha is best known as a leading practitioner of the Korean monochrome art trend known as Dansaekhwa. However, the arc of Ha's practice from the 1960s to the present is more fundamentally characterized by his wide explorations of materiality and ways of challenging the conventions of art making.
Lee Yil was a Korean art critic and art historian. Writing predominately in Korean, but also occasionally French, the critic penned numerous texts on modern and contemporary Korean art. Lee wrote extensively on Dansaekhwa in his efforts to define contemporary Korean art within a larger global context. His citation of foreign artists, scholars, and art critics demonstrates his vested interest in bringing modern and contemporary Korean art into dialogue with the international art world, and determining the place of 20th century Korean within this broader sphere. This larger project included proposing historical periods for modern and contemporary Korean art, and coining theoretical terms like "reduction" and "expansion," which Lee would utilize in his writing for many decades.
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