Blum & Poe

Blum & Poe is a contemporary art gallery located in Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo.

Blum & Poe was founded by Tim Blum and Jeff Poe in Santa Monica, California, in September 1994.

The inaugural exhibition in Santa Monica featured Stroke, an installation by British artist Anya Gallaccio, consisting of chocolate smeared onto the gallery walls.

In 2003, Blum & Poe relocated to a 5,000-square-foot warehouse on the edge of Culver City, 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.

On its 15th anniversary in 2009, the gallery purchased a 22,000-square-foot building across the street on La Cienega Boulevard and renovated it into a series of exhibition spaces on two floors.

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. 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.

In January 2010, Blum & Poe held a solo exhibition of Lee Ufan, the influential 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.

...
Wikipedia