BLUM

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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.