December 18, 2020
Posed against a blank background, the girl stares up at us like a small child. Her enormous head, small body and wide-open eyes signal “adorable.” Her vulnerability triggers our protective instincts. But then there’s that knife she’s holding...
December 16, 2020
In the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic, an informal group of contemporary galleries from around the world came together to discuss how to navigate through the new challenges of the global crisis as it affected our artists, staff and businesses...
December 1, 2020
I was browsing the latest OVR: Miami Beach, this year’s digital version of Art Basel in Miami Beach (Dec. 2 – 6), hoping to find some fresh new works. I was surprised to find the most vital piece was a new painting by Ha Chong-hyun...
November 26, 2020
In her São Paolo studio, artist Sonia Gomes moves from one sculpture to the next, wrapping cloth and bending wire to make abstracted forms imbued with memory...
October 30, 2020
The date is not recorded with absolute certainty, but one day in the early 1950s, a young American soldier stationed in Korea named JB Blunk paid a visit to a craft store in Tokyo when Isamu Noguchi and his wife, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, happened to be present and they got to talking...
October 30, 2020
Henry Taylor shares a new, unfinished work that captures this specific moment in time — and his ongoing fascination with flight...
October 26, 2020
While many of the year’s art and design exhibitions have been seamlessly and successfully moved online, a triumvirate of New York galleries are making a case for the in-person experience with a collaborative exhibition of art and design set within the rich architectural history of New Canaan in Connecticut...
October 20, 2020
Harvard Five architect and IBM industrial designer Eliot Noyes’ mid-century modernist home currently hosts an enveloping exhibition, At the Noyes House: Blum & Poe, Mendes Wood DM, and Object & Thing, that transports guests out of time and place...
October 20, 2020
Brooklyn-based artist Eddie Martinez has joined Blum & Poe, which maintains locations in Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo...
October 16, 2020
The painter March Avery has joined Blum & Poe’s artist roster. The 88-year-old New York–based artist will have her second solo show with the gallery at its Los Angeles location in November...
October 13, 2020
The inspiration for Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis’s graphite drawings come primarily from words of all sorts—Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, historical speeches, and best-selling books...
October 9, 2020
The picturesque town of New Canaan, Connecticut, is a hotbed of midcentury-modern masterpieces, thanks to the so-called Harvard Five, a group of innovative architects who settled there in the mid-1940s, spearheaded by Eliot Noyes...
October 9, 2020
The work of artist Penny Slinger includes photography, collage, film and sculpture. Slinger emerged out of the tumult of the 1960s. Like many of her generation, she went on a quest for personal freedom and sexual liberation...
October 7, 2020
As a young boy in northern Japan, Yoshitomo Nara listened to the radio station broadcast from a nearby US Air Base. It was the era of the Vietnam War and American folk music, and while Nara couldn’t understand the lyrics, he was intensely drawn to the sounds he heard...
October 7, 2020
In February 2017, Asuka Anastacia Ogawa had her first solo exhibition in the studio of Henry Taylor, whom she had been introduced to by a mutual friend...
September 14, 2020
Mohamed Bourouissa has been awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020, for his phenomenal exhibition Free Trade...
September 10, 2020
Recently, Peter Doroshenko mentioned that he had been thinking a lot about your work. My response was, “how can you not be thinking about Sam's work”?...
August 28, 2020
The Afro-Brazilian sculptor Sonia Gomes, in a debut U.S. show, gives materials new life — as they have given her life new balance...
August 6, 2020
New York-based artist Eddie Martinez’s work is usually full of color; It’s mostly abstract with some figuration sprinkled in, made with sharp gestural strokes of turquoise, or erratic scribbles of chartreuse, or inside random unidentifiable shapes...
August 1, 2020
In late Fall of 2019, I began a body of work about landscapes. Every morning I took my usual walk around my garden and observed the season changing...
August 1, 2020
In the evenings we walk along the lower Arroyo in Pasadena, where it's always 10 degrees cooler. It's summer now, and the Datura punctuate the hills...
July 24, 2020
Growing up in the far northern reached of Honshu, Japan's largest island, Yoshitomo Nara discovered the outside world through his ears...
July 22, 2020
As the small pool of mega galleries hoovers up more and more of the art world by the day, the stream of emails announcing X rising artist has signed on with Y dealer seems unending...
July 10, 2020
A new catalogue called Iconoclasm, featuring dramatic examples of iconoclastic annihilation across the centuries, could not be more timely in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests worldwide.
June 18, 2020
Sonia Gomes, a São Paulo-based artist known for her abstract sculptures made with wire, textiles, and found objects, has joined Pace Gallery and Blum & Poe, which will represent the artist in the United States and Asia...
June 16, 2020
The daughter of late American sculptor JB Blunk has compiled an extensive and intimate monograph of her father’s acclaimed life, work and home...
June 12, 2020
In an online group exhibition coordinated by Blum & Poe Broadcasts, Dave Muller, and Three Day Weekend, viewers are offered an introspective on absence...
June 4, 2020
Think of the act of drawing and you’ll likely envisage a pencil. Chicago artist Tony Lewis indeed favors a Caran d’Ache Grafwood 9B graphite pencil for many of his abstract works...
May 14, 2020
The L.A. gallery veterans have an air of indie swagger that’s rare in the big-money art world. Now they’re reconsidering the role of the gallery and imagining a new kind of art-viewing experience...
May 5, 2020
Artists are sheltering at home, and despite the disruptions to their lives and limited access to materials and space, many still feel an urge to create...
April 17, 2020
Julian Schnabel speaks with Arman Naféei about the soundtrack to his life for the podcast Are We On Air ?...
April 17, 2020
Art is known to have a preternatural power when it comes to ageing, keeping hands nimble and minds agile...
April 17, 2020
In this episode of Dior Talks, series host Katy Hessel, a London-based curator, writer and art historian, speaks to Penny Slinger, the British-born, California-based artist, about her long career and her recent Dior collaborations with Maria Grazia Chiuri...
April 17, 2020
Karel Appel was a Dutch artist whose work is characterized by his use of bright colors, simple forms, and expressive brushstrokes. His work emphasized a move away from formality in artmaking and an emphasis on creating a sense of dynamic energy...
April 7, 2020
Los Angeles–based contemporary artist Theodora Allen’s paintings contribute to this history of mute images—similarly soundless compositions that evoke the atmosphere surrounding the emanation of a melody that has never been and will never be heard...
April 4, 2020
A pool of white diffused light beams across the entrance of Los Angeles' Blum and Poe as Asuka Anastacia Ogawa enters...
March 24, 2020
What do you discuss when talking to a painter’s painter, the artist everyone cites as their favorite or an influential force? Well, you obviously talk about painting and painters. And, in the instance of sitting down with Brooklyn-based painter, Eddie Martinez, you chat about tennis, strategy and the art of collecting...
March 12, 2020
‘New Images of Man’, curated by Alison Gingeras at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, is ‘part homage, part radical revision’ of the eponymous exhibition...
March 6, 2020
Dave Muller’s wall-size painting Dust Jacket #1 (NIM Strand), 2020, depicts a worn copy of the catalogue for a 1959 Museum of Modern Art exhibition curated by Peter Selz, New Images of Man...
March 3, 2020
Delicacy has no place in the pastels of artist Mimi Lauter, who creates richly textured, chromatically dense works...
February 27, 2020
The British photomontage artist with hex appeal raises ghosts in the Cambridge gallery and modernist house for her first UK retrospective...
February 24, 2020
“It was a hard run, we were $#@%ing broke forever," says Tim Blum. Here's how they pulled it off...
February 24, 2020
Responding to the unique architectural environment of Richard Neutra's Los Angeles home and workspace, artist Shio Kusaka has quietly populated this iconic example of domestic mid-century modernism...
February 15, 2020
February 15, 2020
“No man ever steps in the same river twice,” the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once stated. The Museum of Cycladic Art’s latest exhibition—a survey of Lynda Benglis’s provocative sculptural work...
February 5, 2020
Inspired by MoMA classic, "New Images of Man" at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles shows dozens of artists tackling the human form...
February 1, 2020
From the stillness of her LA studio, Shio Kusaka produces works filled with life and levity. Jennifer Piejko explores her work ahead of a new exhibition in dialogue with the sleek spaces of Neutra VDL...
February 1, 2020
The oldest known still-lifes are ancient Egyptian—frescoes of figs for the afterlife. The Assyrians carved pomegranates from ivory...
January 31, 2020
The whole of humanity is a mighty big topic to tackle, but a radical new exhibition sets out to reflect on what it means to be alive today. It offers a slice of our contemporary moment, and couldn’t have come at a more urgent time...
January 23, 2020
The press release for the US Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale described Robert Colescott (1925–2009) as “arguably the most important American figurative painter of his generation.”
January 18, 2020
The art maverick first made her name in the punk era with collages fusing fashion and pornography, and a major retrospective proves her work still provokes...
January 15, 2020
From a new base in Mexico, the artist has created ever larger examples of the charged, abstract sculpture he’s become known for—some of which go on view in New York this winter...
January 14, 2020
He’s injected pasta with drugs and let goats loose in a gallery. Now Darren Bader is putting food on plinths and asking visitors to turn it into tasty salad. We try to find out why...
January 13, 2020
The prolific artist is crafting his career with so much charisma, all six of his galleries have fallen into step...
January 10, 2020
In Matt Johnson’s solo show at Blum & Poe’s Culver City headquarters, the junk is anti-junk, and the ethos, though at times laugh-out-loud funny, is earnest through and through...
January 7, 2020
Much of the work produced by Los Angeles-based sculptor Matt Johnson attempts to speak to both the fields of art and architecture by marrying the material language of the latter with the playfulness of the former...
December 11, 2019
The title of Henry Taylor’s large, robust solo at Blum & Poe — “Niece Cousin Kin Look How Long It’s Been” — suggests a big, raucous family reunion...
December 11, 2019
Parergon cast light on a period of Japanese art history that bridges the austere formalism of mid-century Mono-ha artists with today’s unselfconsciously commercial postmodernists...
December 11, 2019
“Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” started its tour of U.S. museums at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, where it can be seen through Jan. 12, 2020...
December 5, 2019
The biracial artist Robert Colescott (1925-2009) didn’t fully claim his black identity until he was in his 40s, but he did so with a vengeance...
December 3, 2019
At Blum & Poe in Culver City, curved canvases fill the main gallery, each one lyrically balancing on a unique base...
November 20, 2019
One reason to enjoy Yukinori Yanagi’s solo show at Blum & Poe is the eeriness with which the centerpiece of the exhibition matches the color of the leaves outside the gallery window...
November 20, 2019
This quest for a more profound relationship to the earth, the cosmos, deep history, and oneself that occasions so many cross-Texas road trips is also the life-long obsession of Brazilian sculptor Solange Pessoa. Her show of new and recent work, “Longilonge,” now open at Ballroom Marfa, grapples with distinctly West Texas themes...
November 19, 2019
From abstraction with a hard-on to his recent Self Examination paintings, Caroll Dunham's younger self couldn't have imagined the twists his work would take...
November 15, 2019
This L.A. artist paints with flat acrylic color and a speedy but nuanced gestural simplicity that can break effortlessly into passages of surprising detail...
November 9, 2019
chocolate factory, stepping inside Anya Gallaccio’s installation, Stroke, at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles is a portal to delightful possibilities...
November 5, 2019
When I first arrived in town, more years ago than I care to remember, Jeffrey was one of my first friends. At the time, he was one-third of a band of incorrigible young exhibitionists called the Blue Daisies, who gave wildly abrasive performances in varying states of undress...
November 1, 2019
Cast and carved from sober materials such as marble, wood, and bronze, the deceptively lissome sculptures of Alma Allen contain more than one crack at the idea of truth in materials...
November 1, 2019
A decade after his death, Robert Colescott is still mostly known for his paintings of “the old masters in blackface,” as he once lamented...
October 24, 2019
In his multi-layered practice spanning photography, film, installation, sculpture and drawing, Mohamed Bourouissa addresses systems of power and domination, and questions the circulation of images, ideas, and money...
October 19, 2019
Theodora Allen's world is subtle, enigmatic, filled with profound and multilayered meaning. The Californian artist creates paintings that draw the viewers in a transcendental state, delivering a meditative and deeply introspective experience through art...
October 2, 2019
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...
October 1, 2019
September 24, 2019
Robert Colescott’s paintings feel very 2019. Slipping between trippy figuration and allegorical satire, offbeat art history references and Jim Crow-era stereotypes, Colescott’s dynamic canvases reckon with the issues that have defined cultural discourse for the last decade...
September 20, 2019
Algerian-born Paris-based artist Mohamed Bourouissa speaks to Katrina Kufer about his people-led photography that shows authentic facets of under-exposed society...
September 16, 2019
For celebrated Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, drawing is as innate as breathing, or even thinking...
September 12, 2019
We're continuing recaps of some great post-summer shows worldwide, like this fantastic Blum and Poe Tokyo debut by LA-based artist Friedrich Kunath...
September 11, 2019
This group show is named after the tinted, convex pocket mirrors favored by British landscape painters from the eighteenth century: Claude mirrors...
September 9, 2019
March Avery was born in New York City in 1932 to painters Milton and Sally Michel Avery. She began taking lessons from her famous father as a child and had her first solo exhibition in 1963...
September 5, 2019
Mohamed Bourouissa, born in Algeria and raised in the banlieues, shines a light on the most disenfranchised...
September 1, 2019
For decades, Yun Hyong-Keun has been known as a major figure—perhaps the major figure—among the monochrome painters that emerged underground during the oppressive military dictatorship of the 1970s in the Republic of Korea...
August 31, 2019
As March was growing up, absolutely everyone she knew, and not just her parents, was an artist. She explains in a lengthy catalogue interview that she thought that making art was the only thing people did. And so, from an early age, each summer modeling her parents’ behavior, she sketched and painted alongside them without paying attention to the content of their work...
August 15, 2019
The artist Julian Hoeber grew up in Philadelphia in a house designed by the Philadelphia architect Frank Furness...
August 9, 2019
Eighty-seven is a ripe old age to get your first solo show at a major New York gallery. March Avery’s works will be showing at Blum & Poe throughout August—the first time her work has been seen in the city for two decades...
July 31, 2019
>BTWN< kicks off with a night of comedy, hosted by artist and comedian Casey Jane Ellison...
July 26, 2019
March Avery is a painter—“It never occurred to me that I’d be anything else,” she has said. That’s because her parents, Milton Avery and Sally Michel, were painters themselves...
July 26, 2019
Though she may have lived her entire life known as the daughter of Milton Avery and Sally Michel, March Avery has carved out her own place as a deft painter...
June 27, 2019
he made psychic dolls houses, erotic wedding cakes and full-frontal collages. But the world wasn’t ready for her powerful personal visions. Is ‘Lady Picasso’ about to get her dues?...
June 27, 2019
Düsseldorf and Los Angeles are a wide aways apart. Geographically, the 5,600 or so miles is no stone’s throw; civically, denizens of the Rhineland city actually revere their scenic waterfront, strolling on the Embankment Promenade, as opposed to the eschewed and sunbaked L.A. River...
June 22, 2019
A toxic beauty emanates from — or maybe infects — six impressive new landscape photographs and three abstractions by Florian Maier-Aichen...
June 11, 2019
A vast commission by the Danish artist injects a healthy dose of colour into Terminal 2’s newly revealed extension...
June 1, 2019
In the years since Mika Yoshitake curated the 2012 exhibition "Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha" for Blum & Poe, the gallery has continued to mount shows exploring the work of this 1960s and '70s Japanese movement...
May 31, 2019
Words are the primary source materials for artist Tony Lewis’s drawings...
May 23, 2019
Big news from the Blum & Poe team: the international enterprise has added the seminal, freethinking mid-career Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi to its roster...
May 18, 2019
Bridging almost a century of Brazilian art, Visions of Brazil: Reimagining Modernity from Tarsila to Sonia at Blum & Poe in New York (30 April–22 June 2019), hosted in collaboration with Mendes Wood DM, offers a rereading of Brazilian Modernism through the works of artists practising at different times, from the 20th century through to the present day...
May 4, 2019
'He was not a "political" kind of person. He just wanted to be honest and straight. But it was not easy in Korea to live like that,' writes curator Kim Inhye on artist Yun Hyong-keun...
May 2, 2019
For a quarter of a century, Tim Blum and Jeff Poe have been showing some of the most notable Japanese artists to emerge since World War II...
May 2, 2019
“Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s” offers an intriguing, wide-ranging survey of artistic themes and approaches in Japan between Mono-ha’s heyday in the 1970s and the rise of neo-pop by the century’s end...
April 1, 2019
Pia Camil's Studio in Mexico City is an expansive, windowless room on the ground floor of an old building tucked away between a wide arterial road and the city’s Parque de Chapultepec...
March 15, 2019
Ha Chong-hyun is one of the pioneering figures in the postwar art history of Korea...
March 9, 2019
Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s installation “Jizoing” consists of 18 photographs and a large pile of futons. Stacked in a corner a capacious gallery at Blum & Poe, the futons form a mountain one must climb to see the images...
March 8, 2019
The first New York show of the exuberantly provocative African-American painter since his death, in 2009, at the age of eighty-three, is as startling as ever...
February 27, 2019
At Museu de Arte de São Paulo and Casa de Vidro, São Paulo, hand-woven sculptures inhabit the buildings, incorporating tree trunks and branches...
February 26, 2019
“Parergon,” a two-part exhibition at Blum & Poe, puts a spotlight on an influential yet unfamiliar era of Japanese contemporary art of the 1980s and ’90s that was shaped by political, economic, and social upheaval...
February 15, 2019
Curated by art historian Mika Yoshitake, this is a revelatory affair, with work made by Japanese artists in the last two decades of the 20th century that is rarely seen in the United States...
February 6, 2019
The British artist draws from Surrealism to empower women to reclaim their “birthright” to sexual expression and deconstruct oppressive structures of power...
January 30, 2019
How much of Darren Bader’s art do we need in the world? The world, after all, is already full of the kinds of objects that Bader brings into his exhibitions: art, words, images, personalities, ideas. Its very fullness is arguably the condition that Bader’s work both critiques and thrives on...
January 30, 2019
Theodora Allen’s Ghostly Paintings Hark Back to the Middle Ages Viewing myths and fairytales from a Humanist perspective, the American painter’s latest body of ethereal works reference the plants that contributed to the first widely used anaesthetics, as well as weeds and wildflowers in her native LA. Margaret Andersen visits her in the sunny Pasadena studio where she lives and works...
January 27, 2019
Plants have an enduring power over their onlookers. They seduce us with their silent stillness. They fascinate us with their ability to thrive. They entice us with their potential flavor. They ensnare us with their abilities to soothe the body and alter the mind. They are reminders of our mortality...
January 15, 2019
January 15, 2019
January 4, 2019
By now, it is standard practice for Darren Bader to excavate the soft luster and mutability of certain aesthetic horizons. Enter his illusory oeuvre and find incursions...
January 1, 2019
An underrecognized figure within the history of modernist abstraction, Harvey Quaytman (1937–2002) worked at the crossroads of Abstract Expressionism, constructivism, and Minimalism...
December 11, 2018
This, the first museum retrospective devoted to the New York painter Harvey Quaytman (1937 – 2002), includes more than seventy works, many of them large. He was certainly always well known, at least in New York, in part thanks to the persistent advocacy of his long time dealer, David McKee...
December 1, 2018
December 1, 2018
When Donald Judd asked Yun Hyong-Keun what art is, the latter responded that art is “artless and bland.” To some viewers of Yun’s paintings—which have been associated with Korean Dansaekhwa—these words may serve as curious descriptors of the late artist’s striking, monochromatic canvases...
November 29, 2018
An exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, New York, shows the artist’s attempt to break out of step with time...
November 15, 2018
In Sensus Oxynation at Blum & Poe, Mimi Lauter’s hallucinogenic, heavily pigmented drawings were intentionally arranged to connote the hallowed chambers of a chapel...
November 6, 2018
Without overt intention, this has become an age of portraiture. It’s not only Instagram, but portraits precede every tweet and supervise every LinkedIn profile...
November 2, 2018
Pioneering British artist Penny Slinger creates work in many mediums and is best known for her surreal dreamlike collages, photography and art performance. Slinger came to prominence in the 1960’s with her radical art and feminist perspective...
November 1, 2018
If the face is the mirror of the mind and the eyes the window to the soul, what happens when visages are obscured?...
October 31, 2018
It would be too simple to say that Paul Mogensen is doing the best work of his life right now. Over his 50-year career he has made many excellent paintings, all adamantly abstract. He has extracted an impressive variety from the possibilities of proportion and geometry...
October 25, 2018
I think you need to walk around the show and just see how you feel,” says artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel as he explains his new exhibition, “Orsay Through the Eyes of Julian Schnabel,” which opened Oct. 10 at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris...
October 21, 2018
In every interview with Paul Mogensen that I have read, he never fails to mention two biographical facts. The first is that he learned about artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin from the book, The Russian Experiment in Art 1863 – 1922 (1962) by Camilla Gray; he goes on to explain that while he was attracted by what Rodchenko and Tatlin were up to, he was not interested in Kasimir Malevich. The second is that, growing up in Los Angeles, close to aircraft factories, he had a very strong math-science education...
October 4, 2018
The artist talks about the inspiration behind his gilded wallpaper-mounted installation at Frieze London...
October 4, 2018
Painter Lee Ufan coats an aesthetic of applied philosophy onto his highly conceptual, abstract paintings. That’s probably obvious to anyone who’s seen the master of meditative minimalism’s work...
October 1, 2018
Through its evocation of physical and psychological borders and, by implication, the global resurgence in nationalism and the ideological duplicity of Donald Trump’s Mexican border wall and Theresa May’s Brexit, Pia Camil’s exhibition “Split Wall” provides a glimpse into the emotional undercurrents of this small city’s relationship with wider issues—surprisingly enough, given that this is the Mexican artist’s first solo exhibition in Britain...
October 1, 2018
Paul Mogensen became known for his single-color many paneled paintings utilizing mathematical ratios, which were first shown at the Bykert Gallery in New York City in 1966...
September 1, 2018
September 1, 2018
In the 1960s, after graduating from Indiana University and moving to New York, sculptor Wendell Dayton worked as an informal studio assistant to Robert Grosvenor...
September 1, 2018
September 1, 2018
In the late 1980s, Yukie Ishikawa was part of the Japanese New Painting movement in which artists explored subversive artistic languages in response to the design and advertisement culture...
August 24, 2018
“The level of discomfort my paintings generate has always surprised me.” Osman Can Yerebakan meets with Connecticut-based artist Carroll Dunham to discuss vulnerability, toxic masculinity and the timeless act of wrestling...
August 17, 2018
Romina Provenzi meets with Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara at his creative retreat in northern Japan, where the two discuss Nara’s far-reaching practice alongside his motives for establishing N’s YARD and the importance of spontaneous discovery...
August 13, 2018
The artist Darren Bader had been in Rome for a spell, and was passing through Palermo on his way to several weeks at the beach on the Tyrrhenian coast. We agreed to meet in Palermo, where we could visit the city’s sunstruck churches, with their grandiose, almost careless accretion of centuries of styles, and converse along the way...
August 7, 2018
Dark-colored columns and planes lie on giant linen and cotton canvases. Upon a close look, one can see the gradation of colors on the rough textures of the canvases...
August 3, 2018
Pia Camil invites us to view her new and existing output in a detached landscape; there is to be no connection between the city streets outside and the art inside. This is surprising for an artist who has spent a large part of her career creating work in response to urban spaces, economics and the media...
August 1, 2018
This is not the first appearance in a museum for Urban Riders, Mohamed Bourouissa’s exhibition that opened at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris on January 26...
July 30, 2018
Imagine living not only in the midst of pristine natural surroundings but actually feeling truly embraced by them, breathing in warm woody aromas as an abundance of curvaceous redwood forms hug you inward. Such is the state of being inside the intimate, hand-built abode of the late prolific American sculptor JB Blunk...
July 30, 2018
July 20, 2018
French-Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa’s latest project offers a diverse community a place for growth...
July 16, 2018
The Los Angeles–based artist Henry Taylor, known for his empathetic portraits of friends, fellow artists, historical figures, and even psychiatric patients, has been named the winner of the 2018 Robert De Niro Sr. Prize...
July 3, 2018
Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis has joined Blum & Poe. The gallery announced its representation of the Lewis one year after hosting its first show with the artist. “Tony Lewis: Jot” (April 28-June 17, 2017) presented new colored pencil and graphite drawings and was also the artist’s first exhibition in Los Angeles...
June 29, 2018
In the Shadow Hills section of Sunland—a semi-rural Los Angeles municipality where yellow signs warn motorists to “share the road” with equestrians—there’s a dusty lot on the corner of Art Street...
June 28, 2018
At the age of 80, the sculptor Wendell Dayton is having his first major show, a six-decade survey of his work at the Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe...
June 6, 2018
In Dave Muller's current solo exhibition, multicolored drips trickle down the wall from part of a mural (w+m, all works cited, 2018) that reads: “WORDS and MUSIC.”
June 5, 2018
Carroll Dunham employs a dictionary of forms to tell his story—men are penises, women are breasts and vaginas, and nature is reduced to google-eyed beasts and the placid and bland but vaguely threatening background of the forest...
June 1, 2018
May 30, 2018
Mimi Lauter’s ebullient pastel works at Blum & Poe play with the format of multipart European altarpieces, creating the effect of a chapel in the large downstairs gallery...
May 25, 2018
It should come as no surprise that Tomoo Gokita’s Peekaboo at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery is, as the title suggests, entirely about surprises.
May 21, 2018
Anya Gallaccio's practice is characterised by the twin notions of control and transition and, in particular, how each can be implemented and represented. Her approach often involves setting in motion a process and then letting go...
May 15, 2018
Twelve new calendrical works and an impressionistic Van Gogh biopic confirm the versatile precocity of the maximalist master of the Eighties, Julian Schnabel...
May 4, 2018
Anya Gallaccio, an artist used to making memorable statements, is leading the way through Lindisfarne Castle, a National Trust property on Holy Island, Northumberland. Built as a gun emplacement by Henry VIII to deter invaders from the north, it owes its grandeur to Sir Edwin Lutyens, who enlarged and converted it into a castle-cum-luxury holiday home from 1903.
May 1, 2018
May 1, 2018
Rich and flat and saturated as hell, all the colours in this decades-spanning exhibition by late painter Robert Colescott (1925–2009) cream and matt across history, from ancient pools through Old West skirmishes into more modern dalliances clipped from dirty magazines and canned ads...
May 1, 2018
“I constantly think about how to confuse or distort the typical order of things,” artist Kishio Suga wrote for a 2005 essay anthologized in Kishio Suga’s Work from a Zen Perspective (2008)...
April 30, 2018
In over fifty new paintings depicting the circular labels of assorted vinyl albums and singles, Muller draws upon his endless fascination and encyclopedic knowledge of music and its capacity to shape both individual and cultural identities...
April 16, 2018
Black, white, and the tawny hues of bare wood dominate the Japanese artist’s geometric abstractions, hybrids of painting and assemblage...
April 13, 2018
Launched in 2015, The Grand Tour celebrates the interwoven art, architecture, cultural heritage and landscape of Nottingham and Derbyshire. Since its inception, big-shot British male art stars like Simon Starling and Pablo Bronstein have helped put this UK missive into the international spotlight...
April 4, 2018
To see in artifice a natural yet invisible gesture is to be open to more than what is most obviously present...
April 2, 2018
In a politically correct culture, it’s liberating and unnerving to step into Robert Colescott’s exhibition at Blum and Poe, where the late painter revels in representations of stereotypes...
March 28, 2018
Cowboys remain an American emblem to the French. They have seen enough westerns to have a clear idea of what cowboys should look like: proud, rugged, dirt-flecked — and white...
March 26, 2018
“It’s essentially a huge collage – it’s the inside of my head,” says artist Linder, ahead of her newly opened exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, titled The House of Fame. The gloomily lit room in which we stand is named The House of Rest, and along with three further gallery spaces...
March 25, 2018
The world has changed — two or three times — since Robert Colescott (1925-2009) made the 20 paintings and 21 drawings in his exhibition at Blum & Poe. But some things haven’t changed, and they are the subjects of his rambunctious pictures...
March 22, 2018
The scene: inside Nottingham Contemporary gallery. A dialogue is unfolding between the artist, Linder, and a visitor from Cambridge University Library, who has come bearing an item for the exhibition she is curating...
March 14, 2018
Tony Lewis finds a new way of writing poetry, through artistry, and his assemblage of cut-up dialog balloons from Bill Watterson’s much-loved comic strip...
March 14, 2018
On a Friday in Costa Rica, the artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel was waiting for his surfboards. They were tied up in customs, but finally arrived that January morning...
March 7, 2018
In Cockatoo Island's cavernous power generation room, banks of switches and electrical dials line the walls, vast generators are bolted to the tessellated floor and dusty tools lie on benches, apparently undisturbed for decades...
March 3, 2018
฿o₫៛€$ features new and old work, including inkjet prints on canvas that consider the language of global maritime trading routes, sculptural renditions of shipping mechanisms, and a video that functions as the junction of the artist’s lines of inquiry...
February 23, 2018
It has been more than six months since the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis faced an overdose of art-world controversy: Native American protests over Sam Durant’s sculpture Scaffold that quickly led to its removal...
February 7, 2018
For true mystics, there is no division between the real and the spiritual. The symbolic folds into our lives, shaping the world and us in it...
February 7, 2018
In the American sitcom, A Different World, The Cosby Show’s Denise Huxtable goes to college. The series, which aired on NBC from September 24, 1987 to July 9, 1992, centered on students at the fictional historically black Hillman College in Virginia...
February 5, 2018
The one-time Buzzcocks house artist becomes "a demigod of the printed page" in her residency at England's Chatsworth House...
February 4, 2018
The two Californian artists never actually met, (Allen continues to work, recently relocating from Joshua Tree to Mexico City; Blunk passed away in 2002) yet the resonances between their practices are uncanny: corporeal curves, cheeky, prodding phallus shapes, curls of bronze, marble, ceramic and wood that make their materials look soft, malleable and sensual...
February 1, 2018
To depict one’s own consciousness may be a tall order, but that’s the long-standing mission of this Los Angeles artist. It takes enthralling if, at times, high-handed form here in a series of sculptural models of fantasy architecture and trompe-l’oeil paintings of vision boards...
January 24, 2018
In Poems of Our Climate, Saunders presents a series of new oil on chiffon paintings, copper-plate etchings and photographs, along with a large-scale animation installation...
December 23, 2017
Two years after Blum & Poe mounted fiber artist Françoise Grossen’s first survey in the United States, her third show with the gallery feels like a gift of quietude...
December 15, 2017
“The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me,” a meditation on America’s still-virulent legacy of slavery that won the National Book Award for nonfiction...
December 15, 2017
In the two years since septuagenarian Swiss-born artist Françoise Grossen mounted her first show here, several institutional exhibitions have positioned her as one of the most inventive fiber artists of her generation...
December 4, 2017
Fresh out of graduate school in London, the studio was transplanted into the museum, marking the emerging artist’s first solo museum exhibition. I did a “studio visit” with Alvaro after the opening, and we talked about the project...
December 1, 2017
Lynda Benglis would never claim, as Jackson Pollock did, that she was nature. But a wide-ranging exhibition of her irrepressible works at Blum & Poe in Culver City does what nature does: moves us in ways we don’t fully understand and connects us to processes that are bigger than all of us...
December 1, 2017
Alvaro Barrington’s paintings attend to combinations of materials, movements, and references both art historical and cultural in a broader sense. Bright hibiscus flowers evoke bodily forms and tones, while thick yarns more explicitly delineate body parts...
December 1, 2017
Of late, many artists and critics have decried the toxic effects of greed on contemporary art and, more cogently, society. Few, however, have broached this fraught subject with the hallucinatory vision, iconographic complexity and references to tradition-rooted morality that Alexander Tovborg develops in these complementary shows...
November 27, 2017
Born in East Berlin but at home in East L.A., painter Friedrich Kunath makes airbrushed canvases layered with strange cartoon figures, blazing sunsets, and deep thoughts...
November 22, 2017
Jim Shaw and the late Mike Kelley have fully cemented their reputations as the quintessential Los Angeles artists of the postmodern era...
November 13, 2017
In a world saturated with digital images, Maier-Aichen’s photographic works stand out. In his current exhibition at 303 Gallery, half of the images are fairly straightforward landscapes that have been manipulated to produce surreal colors....
November 8, 2017
Blum & Poe presents a solo exhibition of paintings, sculpture, and installations by Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa, her first in the US...
November 1, 2017
One of the most enthralling objects in this decades-spanning exhibition is the sprawling “Mermaid I,” from 1978. Woven from twisted rope, a trio of eight-foot-long fish-tail braids meet where the mythic creature’s torso would start...
November 1, 2017
November 1, 2017
Resembling a melting hillock, comically propped up with an array of bars cast in stainless steel, HILLS AND CLOUDS, 2014, is a wonder to behold, an enormous sculpture in which Lynda Benglis’s depth of material knowledge is matched by a sheer ambition of scale...
October 24, 2017
Throughout his career, Mohamed Bourouissa has anchored his projects in collaboration with friends and strangers. His Barnes Foundation exhibition, titled “Urban Riders” and constituting his first solo show in the United States, comprised eighty-five works related to the time he spent with Philadelphia’s Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club...
October 19, 2017
Saunders works across a variety of media to challenge the boundaries of painting, printmaking, photography and animation. Drawing on source material from avant-garde films to found photographs and using his own invented techniques...
October 6 – September 6, 2017
During the 1970s, a span of work from a group of revolutionary, sex-positive female artists was deemed too sexually explicit to be put on show...
October 4, 2017
Friedrich Kunath’s latest exhibition is fragrant with nostalgia, melancholy, and whims...
September 7, 2017
Since I first arrived to New York City in the fall of 1985, in search of an artistic and bohemian existence, Julian Schnabel has been a figure with epic stature, always in the news, then as today...
August 28, 2017
"My think tank's in here," says Friedrich Kunath as he walks me past a Bond-worthy Jaguar E-Type, a rolling sculpture of sorts that anchors the foyer of his sprawling 14,000-square-foot studio in the East Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno...
August 1, 2017
If I went to work and didn’t know what I was going to do, I would spiral to the point where it might take me a whole day to recover. So I always have the next thing planned out. Someone from my studio will e-mail me a photo of the painting in progress. That way, I can draw over it at home, so when I go back to the studio I start with my notes...
July 24, 2017
A founding member of the Japanese art movement Mono-ha, Kishio Suga was born in Morioka, Japan, in 1944 and currently lives and works in Ito City, Japan...
July 20, 2017
One can’t help but think of the current political climate when looking at Jim Shaw’s apocalyptic installation The Wig Museum, one of two inaugural exhibitions at the new Marciano Art Foundation in Central LA...
July 20, 2017
A visual maelstrom of black-and-white screen prints and paintings opens Jim Shaw's exhibit: their marks swirl and overlap, subsuming figures distorted as if they were reflections in a fun-house mirror...
July 14, 2017
n her entrancing second show at Blum & Poe, L.A. painter Theodora Allen continues to visualize the space of dreams and visions. Her two new bodies of work evoke a state of altered consciousness: Physical reality feels muted, spiritual awareness elevated...
July 14, 2017
The two artists discuss their shared affection for Justin Bieber and Instagram, as well as the information superhighways found in Grotjahn's work...
July 13, 2017
Among the now internationally acclaimed Dansaekhwa artists, Ha Chong-Hyun (b. South Korea, 1935) is notable for his undeniable influence on the shifting landscape of Korean art in the 1960s and '70s...
July 10, 2017
Dia Art Foundation has added eight works by the artists Lee Ufan and Kishio Suga to its collection...
June 27, 2017
This history hums in the background of ‘Bara, Bara, Bara’, Pia Camil’s current solo exhibition, which occupies nearly 1,200 square metres of the cavernous, converted warehouse of Dallas Contemporary. ‘A Pot for a Latch’, Camil’s 2016 solo project at New York’s New Museum, invited visitors to add to and take from commercial goods she installed on grid-like racks...
June 23, 2017
Anya Gallaccio's to see if time was there is a massive tree stump made from Texas limestone and modeled on a specific sequoia tree. The stone is white so that the stump looks like an albino of the species, or a husk, like a discarded snake skin or the dried corpse of a Texas pill bug...
June 21, 2017
Penelope Slinger was born in London in 1947 and graduated from Chelsea Art College in 1969 with a body of work made as a feminist reaction to Max Ernst’s collages. Since then, Penny’s art practice has constantly shifted mediums and viewpoints irrespective of art world...
June 14, 2017
Two long-haired, nearly identical naked men wrestle in Carroll Dunham’s The Golden Age drawings, on view at Blum & Poe. They’re in a mostly empty landscape, underneath a cartoonish tree, often with a bemused, dark-haired dog looking on...
June 11, 2017
The Seattle Art Museum is organizing a major exhibition of three critically recognized African American artists—Robert Colescott (1925-2009), Kerry James Marshall, and Mickalene Thomas...
June 1, 2017
The best thing about a Darren Bader “work” is that you may not know it’s a “work” at all. It just “is,” and often barely perceptible as such, like the infamous two burritos on a windowsill at MoMA PS1, left to rot in the sun, un-labeled...
May 31, 2017
The paper in each part of Dorothea Rockburne’s series Locus I-VI (1972) is pretty unforgiving. The mixture of lines and edges are slow to reveal detail and require more than a causal glance to let that detail sink in and solidify. But in the company of Korean painter Kwon Young-woo and Japanese artist Rakuko Naito, working with paper takes on something unexpected...
May 24, 2017
There are no bodies in Gavin Kenyon’s exhibition at Blum & Poe New York — only their contours in the garments that cover, seal and protect them...
May 14, 2017
Yukinori Yanagi uses ants to tunnel through images of flags and money made of sand, as a critique of borders and the symbols of power that separate us...
May 1, 2017
Port meets the Brooklyn-born artist, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, father and man about town during an afternoon at his home and studio...
April 25, 2017
Kishio Suga's exhibition offered a careful choreography of sticks leaning against wood panels, ropes wrapped around rocks, fabric strips twisted around curved metal plates...
March 28, 2017
Henry Taylor paints people as they are—in their homes, on the street—but he’s more than a portraitist of everyday America. His depictions of friends, strangers, and public figures are deceptively simple; his matter-of-fact approach results in works that seem as though the subject is truly present before you, while suggesting histories both personal and collective...
March 21, 2017
I’ve been asking around about Tomoo Gokita, and I’ve heard various things: he likes beer and boobs and wrestling. He used to do drawings, but now he paints. He’s a hero among the many underground scenes in Tokyo...
March 19, 2017
Korean artist Kwon Young-woo (1923-2013) spent his entire career pursuing the essence of Oriental painting, but not in the traditional ink-and-wash method...
March 16, 2017
Harvey Quaytman’s paintings of the 1980s and ’90s, a tight selection of which are on view here, bring the visual rhetoric associated with transcendent abstraction down to earth...
March 2, 2017
What's happening, bro?” booms the gravelly voice of Henry Taylor as he crosses South Los Angeles Street, a bustling offshoot of L.A.’s downtown Fashion District...
March 1, 2017
March 1, 2017
February 28, 2017
Sam Durant imbues his work with morally fraught historical narratives of the sort that, properly understood, might make for a more effectual United States citizenry...
February 17, 2017
Mimi Lauter's enthralling drawings have a visual grammar all their own. Their sense of scale is elusive and independent of their physical size. They feel immersive, whether small as a notebook page or large enough to dominate a wall...
February 11, 2017
Sam Durant’s exhibition Build Therefore Your Own World at Blum & Poe examines and creates points of connection between the transcendentalists and African Americans...
February 2, 2017
Inspired by the civil rights movement, Quentin Morris began making all-black paintings and works on paper in 1963 and has continued to do so ever since...
February 1, 2017
January 30, 2017
Exacting reproductions of everyday objects aren’t breaking news (the work of Robert Gober or Fischli & Weiss come to mind), but in this carefully orchestrated show the Los Angeles sculptor takes the technique on a challenging ride...
January 29, 2017
Multimedia artist Sam Durant is both an activist and artist who uses his work to highlight lesser known and forgotten histories. Through his art, he helps the public to uncover and acknowledge our histories, both in order to understand how we got to the present moment historically and to offer correctives now...
January 17, 2017
Richard Foster conducts an extensive interview on collage, carpets, punk, feminism, ballet and the insidiousness of The Great British Bake Off, with Linder Sterling: the groundbreaking multidisciplinary artist and founder member of legendary post-punks, Ludus...
January 12, 2017
Pottery is place, folded and fired. It is soil, stone, flora, topography, and climate, massaged by human tradition and technique. In Japan, the placeness of ceramics has been taken to an extreme with local variations in style proliferating across the island nation...
January 3, 2017
The late JB Blunk is best known as a mid-twentieth century US West Coast furniture maker, sculptor and self-styled architect. Along with earlier woodworker artisans including Wharton Esherick and Espenet Carpenter, he forms part of what has come retrospectively and somewhat loosely, to be considered a Californian modernist arts and crafts movement...
January 1, 2017
For this exhibition, Sam Durant reveals the palimpsests in America’s painful racial history...
January 1, 2017
Highly coherent despite its spatial and formal variety, the work of Pia Camil presents us with a unique combination of problems that relate to urban spaces, the consumerist world and coexistence...
December 19, 2016
Yukinori Yanagi’s most comprehensive exhibition to date, “Wandering Position,” which comprised sixty-three artworks, project plans, and documentary photographs dating from 1986 to the present, occupied three spacious floors of the nonprofit BankART 1929...
December 1, 2016
The display of Kishio Suga’s retrospective Situations is simple: almost all the 23 sculptures on show (created since 1969 and ‘reactivated’ by the artist for the occasion) rest on the concrete floor of HangarBicocca’s open plan, forming a horizontal continuum interrupted only by the black columns bisecting the space...
December 1, 2016
Recently I’ve noticed that when I meet people who know my work, they say, “Oh you must be so busy!” I usually reply with something like, “Well, I’m getting by,” which probably gives people the impression that I’m quite reserved...
November 23, 2016
Françoise Grossen’s career is undergoing a renaissance: the first U.S. survey of her work was held last year at Blum & Poe Gallery in New York, followed by exhibitions in Los Angeles, where the 73-year-old Swiss artist was a student before moving to Manhattan, in 1969...
November 21, 2016
A man takes a picture of himself: he stands proudly, arms behind his back, head turned towards the camera, mouth slightly open...
November 17, 2016
In the sleepy Marin County town of Inverness, on a remote wooded ridge that overlooks the wide blue sweep of the Tomales Bay, sits a modest, low-slung redwood cabin that the late multidisciplinary artist-craftsman JB Blunk built entirely by hand...
November 15, 2016
It is on one of those timeless L.A. late afternoons that we visit the artist Friedrich Kunath in his studio—timeless because the sun set just as gloriously on this day as on each of the 364 other days of the year in this city...
November 8, 2016
Janne Villadsen sits down with Danish artist Alexander Tovborg to discuss his ambitious vision to rewrite his continent's past, through the prism of faith and mythology...
November 1, 2016
More than one hundred ceramic vessels and figurines by Shio Kusaka populated a single pedestal (topped with light-pink Formica) that coursed through the three galleries of Blum & Poe’s ground floor...
November 1, 2016
The portable hole is a deus ex machina of sorts, a black circle that doubles as a teleportation device...
November 1, 2016
October 10, 2016
The people in paintings by Henry Taylor tend to loom. Not in a grandiose or threatening way, but in a portentous one. These people matter...
September 1, 2016
September 1, 2016
Carroll Dunham, or Tip, as his friends call him, is a perfect painter. Do you know what I mean by that? Me, neither. But I’m pretty sure it’s true. He has a vision — a discrete, evolved, impeccably worked-out vision...
September 1, 2016
Days later, the gallery’s still dank with the hotboxed aroma of weed. At the opening of Henry Taylor’s fourth exhibition with this gallery, a film that the artist collaborated on with Kahlil Joseph screened in a shadowy room where a crew of Rastafarians smoked very large spliffs in quietude, just as they do in Wizard of the Upper Amazon, 2016...
August 11, 2016
’A site considered by many the historic center of Concord’s political, literary, and social revolutions is playing host to an outdoor art installation and series of discussions on the challenges faced by African-Americans from Revolutionary times to the present...
August 1, 2016
Francoise Grossen’s exhibition at Blum & Poe consists of a single work, but it is a commanding one...
July 7, 2016
The Japanese artist Shio Kusaka just opened a refined show of delicate, porcelain ceramics at Los Angeles’s Blum & Poe gallery, but the clay figures most prominently visible at her nearby studio in Culver City told a different story...
July 6, 2016
Shio Kusaka, however, has ironically conceived and created a slick summer blockbuster in her current exhibition at Blum & Poe, clustered with artworks that, upon first glance, look like they could be at home in any chic living room shoot...
July 1, 2016
In a review of Paul Mogensen’s second solo exhibition in the late 1960s (at the Bykert Gallery, whose roster also included Carl Andre, Brice Marden, and David Novros), Hilton Kramer gave a succinct, two-sentence description of the paintings’ color, arrangement, and progression, concluding with “that’s all."
June 28, 2016
Former Turner Prize-nominee Anya Gallaccio has made her name creating transient works using organic material, famously placing hundreds of gerberas behind Perspex and coating gallery walls with chocolate. Her new work, however, could not be more permanent, cast as it is in metal...
May 9, 2016
In Hong Kong, during April, to receive one of three prestigious Asia Arts Game Changer awards from the Asia Society, Yoshitomo Nara spoke to Ocula about his work, and how he finds the solitude he needs to create, by living in the small and distant city of Aomori, in northern Japan...
April 29, 2016
Something you may not know about artist Carroll Dunham is that he loves road trips; he will drive to Iowa to watch the HBO filming of Girls just because it’s an excuse to drive to Iowa. Mary Simpson loves chatting with someone in a car for the same reason she prefers sitting with someone at the bar instead of a table; seated side by side and gazing in the same direction gives a different angle to a conversation—you’re both looking, only not at each other. For this conversation they drove to Connecticut just before a snowstorm...
April 20, 2016
New works from Japanese sculptor Susumu Koshimizu are coming to Blum & Poe in Tokyo this spring, bringing the artist’s iconic minimalism to the gallery for the first time...
March 24, 2016
Zhu Jinshi’s first solo exhibition in New York showcased three decades of the artist’s paintings in two separate but complementary styles. His “allover” works cover the canvas completely with paint up to six inches thick...
March 22, 2016
I guess we’re trying to find my thread,’ explained Julian Schnabel, dressed in purple pajamas and a jacket from his Blind Girl Surf Club collaboration with RVCA, during a preview of ’Infinity on Trial’, his debut exhibition with Blum & Poe and first solo show in Los Angeles in nearly a decade...
March 18, 2016
For his exhibition “Le Miroir,” Paris-based Algerian artist Mohamed Bourouissa photographed staged settings with his friends and neighbors, part of that portion of the population known to many in Paris as Les Banlieusards...
March 1, 2016
Painting, photography and film are at the heart of Matt Saunders’s current exhibition, “Two Worlds,” at Blum & Poe gallery in Tokyo. The exhibition features two new bodies of work that are interrelated.
March 1, 2016
March 1, 2016
Despite his many artistic transformations, Kwon Young-woo (1926–2013) managed to provoke several versions of the same response over the course of his six-decade career...
February 25, 2016
You notice her face first. This is odd, because she’s nude, her body bronzed and oiled, with one wiry arm holding a large double-sided dildo between her legs. Her eyes aren’t even in play; a pair of white sunglasses covers them...
February 19, 2016
In Summer of 2012 we travelled around China trying to get a firsthand experience of what at that time was a wide art world phenomenon called Chinese contemporary art...
February 4, 2016
“After the death of an artist, you can have a new look, a fresh look, and suddenly you can see things that you didn’t see before,” Franz Kaiser, the curator of a retrospective of work by the Dutch artist Karel Appel at the Gemeentemuseum here, said as he walked past Appel’s deceptively childlike early canvases and sculpture...
January 30, 2016
A precocious youth forced to work in a factory during the Cultural Revolution, the painter Zhu Jinshi afterwards joined the seminal new art group the Stars (星星), producing works that dabbled in the imported medium of abstraction...
January 27, 2016
Your first up-close encounter with the abstractions of Chinese artist Zhu Jinshi can be something of a shock. The paint, caked on as thick as cement, is vigorously pushed, pulled, and scraped across enormous canvases, producing kaleidoscopic surfaces that look a bit like an asphalt highway buckled by an earthquake...
January 20, 2016
Mark Grotjahn is widely recognized for his painting prowess. Since the mid-1990s, he’s made radiating butterfly-wing-like bursts of rainbow color that create schisms in vision; since the mid-2000s, he’s fashioned canvases with rich thickets of raffialike lines that allude to abstract faces and raw abstraction.
January 7, 2016
Karel Appel would start drawing by shimmering bright muck or line around until it eventually formed into semi-abstract philosophical lava, or monkey shit, or the poetry of release...
January 1, 2016
December 17, 2015
Early last fall, I spoke with Carroll Dunham at his drawing studio, a small, sunlit room in the corner of his Williamsburg apartment overlooking the East River. At the time, he was preparing to move to another floor in the building, and there was scant trace of any artistic presence in the space. The walls were bare. A collection of gleaming silver rulers lay on a table alongside a pencil sharpener and little else...
December 7, 2015
It’s almost like animals allow me to represent personality. The horse, some birds, a dog—it’s not that I have a zoological obsession with the animal kingdom, but after I finished these paintings, I realized that the animals appear to have more of an inner life than the people do...
December 4, 2015
The refusal to create a “clear image,” a critic once said of Yun Hyong-keun's work after seeing it exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art of Seoul in 1974, came out of a privileging of texture—which compromised painting’s “image-bearing function.”
December 1, 2015
November 27, 2015
Julian Hoeber’s exhibition “The Inward Turn” pivots around the idea of an imaginary airport terminal from which people take off only to return to the same point, as if traveling the length of a Mobius strip or circumnavigating a Klein bottle...
November 16, 2015
Conjunction, the title that Korean artist Ha Chong-Hyun has given all of his paintings since the early 1970s, is also the title of his most recent solo show at Tina Kim Gallery in New York...
October 29, 2015
The “First Papers Of Surrealism” exhibition, a collaboration between Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp, was held in New York City in 1942. It was a visual manifesto for the European-born movement, and Duchamp chose for its catalogue cover an image of a piece of Swiss cheese. Aesthetically, the American artist Jim Shaw, whose mid-career retrospective is now on view at the New Museum...
October 23, 2015
For more than three decades, Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw has explored various mediums, ranging from drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation to staging shows made entirely of found objects—and by objects, we mean paintings purchased at thrift stores...
October 22, 2015
For most people, ‘Paris’ means the city’s historic heart with its much-romanticized landmarks. But, beyond the Périphérique, the great boulevard encircling the tourist centre and separating it from the less-visited suburbs, there is another Paris—or rather, a multitude of different Parises, as the work of Mohamed Bourouissa has so eloquently shown...
October 2, 2015
For the month of October, the artwork of inmates from Graterford State prison will hang beside items contributed by the general public along a chain-link fence installation set up in front of Philadelphia’s City Hall. The work, created by Los Angeles–based artist Sam Durant, forms part of an exhibition organized by the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program...
September 21, 2015
Although he's been painting since the 1980s, this is Kazumi Nakamura's first solo exhibition in the U.S...
September 15, 2015
Henry Taylor and I were introduced by our mutual friend and collector, AC Hudgins, at a MoMA PS1 function in 2012. When we met I was about to depart on my first trip to Haiti to do my photographic work...
September 4, 2015
The deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum announced today that Matt Saunders has won its Rappaport Prize, which is given annually to a contemporary artist whose practice is somehow involved with New England...
September 1, 2015
August 21, 2015
Despite the fact that artist Alexander Tovborg identifies with no one religion, and never has, he is engrossed in religious experience, mythology, and spirituality...
August 7, 2015
British artist Anya Gallaccio covered a gallery floor with roses in Brussels, suspended apples in Amsterdam, worked with ice in London and painted walls with chocolate in Vienna and Los Angeles. In the course of each exhibition, the installations radically changed as her materials inevitably deteriorated.
August 7, 2015
Dismissed as craft for decades, fiber as a sculptural medium is finally getting its much deserved due. The recent rediscovery of its many forgotten pioneers continues with this modest but must-see survey of work by the seventy-two-year-old Françoise Grossen—astonishingly, the New York–based Swiss artist’s first ever survey in the United States...
August 6 – 5, 2015
In the catalog for “Fiber Art: Sculpture 1960-Present,” an exhibition that’s been touring the United States since last year, Françoise Grossen offered a succinct description of her generation’s approach: “First we broke with the rectangle, then we broke with the wall.”
July 13, 2015
“I’m trying to exhibit enthusiasm and see if it catches,” says the artist Dave Muller of Three Day Weekend, the meandering vacation-length shows he organized on “bank holidays” for more than a decade in the late ’90s and early ’00s...
July 9, 2015
July 1, 2015
Tomoo Gokita is an outsider among Tokyo art insiders. With his boyish charm, he is sociable yet reticent. He regularly declares his love for beer and professional wrestling—particularly the 1976 match between Japan’s Antonio Inoki and American champion boxer Muhammad Ali...
June 17, 2015
On April 10, 2015, Space Lee Ufan opened at the Busan Museum of Art in Busan, South Korea. It is the second permanent venue dedicated to the artist...
June 14, 2015
Almost 150 years ago, Friedrich Nietzsche invited us to think of wisdom as a digestive track issue. Rather than getting stuck in the mind-body dualism that had dogged European philosophy from Plato's day, the German philosopher suggested we digest ideas in the same way we digest food: drawing sustenance from the good stuff and eliminating the rest...
June 1, 2015
The exhibition, organized by guest curator Fumio Nanjo, director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, and Asia Society’s in-house curator Dominique Chan, presents works that explore the artist’s burgeoning understanding of life’s transience...
June 1, 2015
June 1, 2015
One of the leading lights of both Mono-ha and Dansaekhwa, for the past five decades the influential Korean artist has fused Eastern and Western philosophy to make works that concentrate attention on the slowness of experience, the encounter of human and natural orders, and the silent language of things...
May 18, 2015
Theodora Allen’s paintings have the lived-in feel of worn denim or vintage t-shirts. They are executed in light hues of blue, purple and green, all washed into a mood of late-afternoon burning into evening...
May 1, 2015
March 12, 2015
Theodora Allen paints in thin layers of oil, wiping away each addition before applying the next. The images that result are more visions than views. They have the consistency of meditations or memories, at once persuasive and elusive...
February 28, 2015
In 1974, Lynda Benglis created one of the iconic works of recent art history, Centrefold. The work was presented as an advertisement in Artforum and featured the artist naked, save for a pair of sunglasses, her body oiled...
February 18, 2015
Theodora Allen: I build the paintings up slowly by applying thin layers of oil paint and then, using a soft cloth, I systematically remove what I’ve laid down. With each pass of the cloth, the weave of the linen becomes more pronounced, and traces of color are left behind...
February 1, 2015
January 19, 2015
These sculptures bend, loop, puddle, swirl, and arch in ways that are both exquisitely crafted and weirdly natural. Once I heard an earful of Alma Allen’s story, plump with struggle and shitty luck, his artwork beginning as a homeless street hustle, I understood how his gentle and enduring will shaped these works with their sensual skins and gravitational force...
January 16, 2015
A bulbous piece of wood bears a series of nubby nodules that feel just a little bit sci-fi. A gourd-like shape carved out of black and red marble features a curious nose-like appendage that springs out to greet the viewer. And a piece of Yule marble is transformed into a ring so imperfectly supple it looks as if it were formed by hand...
January 1, 2015
January 1, 2015
December 21, 2014
To follow the trajectory of the work of the artist Carroll Dunham is to embark on the birth of a universe of metaphor. Its inception begins with colorful, abstract paintings on wood veneer of anthropomorphic shapes littered with genitalia in the ’80s, evolving into aggressive phallus-nosed figures engaged in sexual combat in the ’90s...
December 16, 2014
I discovered the work of Ha Chonghyun in 2000 at an exhibition mounted at the Gwangju City Art Museum, curated by the art critic Yoon Jin Sup...
December 4, 2014
Alexander Tovborg, a Danish artist born in 1983, is making his New York debut with “Eternal Feminine,” a series of eye-catching paintings...
December 1, 2014
Layers of graphite shavings create an opaque yet luminous film across the entirety of Tony’s studio, steadily imprinting the drawings that exist both on the walls and floor...
November 26, 2014
Potter Shio Kusaka and painter Jonas Wood are taking on L.A.'s flourishing art scene. But first they have to tackle what's for dinner. The power couple invite Margaret Wappler to their Mar Vista home...
November 5, 2014
Named after the 1968 Japanese film of the same name, the band formed in 1973 with artists Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, filmmaker Cary Loren and lead vocalist Lynn Rovner at its core...
November 1, 2014
Karel Appel (1921–2006) was a key member of Cobra, an artist collective that banded together after World War II to survey not only the war’s destruction but also the possibilities of creation: Perhaps more than anything, it sought to bring “outside” energies to the project of Continental reconstruction...
October 31, 2014
Florian Maier-Aichen first moved to Los Angeles 15 years ago, using the Golden State’s epic sprawl—from the Malibu coastline to the Port of Long Beach—as a platform for his large-format aerial landscapes, often shot with infrared film to hypnotic effect...
September 24, 2014
What? You’re a cat person? No way! So is Darren Bader. During his 2011 show at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, Bader released a statement explaining why his attempt to feature cats in the gallery hadn’t worked out: the artist realized they wouldn’t get along with the goats that would be wandering through one of his characteristically tidy arrays of incompatible objects...
September 12, 2014
“It’s not hard to like Eddie,” says artist Barry McGee, of fellow artist Eddie Martinez. “Everything was already great.” McGee first met Martinez when the latter was an art handler working to install McGee’s show at a Boston gallery...
September 12, 2014
It's odd to see flat-out expressionism turned into art history. Although the colors and impasto in Karel Appel's "Flying Head" (1974) look, with the exception of a hairline crack here and there, much like they probably did when the painting first came off the easel, there's a mysterious vibe of past-ness about them...
September 11, 2014
Elation was almost palpable at the opening of “The Great Circus,” Tomoo Gokita’s impressive first museum solo exhibition at Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Chiba...
July 23, 2014
Do the vastness of advertising industry and the ever-present symbolical universe of contemporary consumerism define the lifestyle of our generation? Is this a true representation of the dysfunctionality of modern society? These are not questionable stances for artist Pia Camil, but road signs for critical response to the reality which overwhelms our sense of expressional freedom...
June 11, 2014
One small scorched pebble, described by the artist Anya Gallaccio as "traumatised" in an explosion at one of the eeriest places in England, stands for a century of sinister and secret events, many of them still covered by the Official Secrets Act...
June 6, 2014
Matt Saunders continues to expand and merge the technical and representational repertoires of photography, drawing and painting in a new body of work that remains anchored deep in cinematic space and time, and that also gestures toward a more luminous poetic realm...
May 31, 2014
Grandeur and simplicity meet in Korean artist Lee Ufan’s series of installations at the Palace of Versailles...
May 5, 2014
At the American artist's first ever show at Gallery Weekend Berlin, Sleek caught up with Hugh Scott-Douglas at Croy Nielsen to talk about the value of the image and interacting markets in his most recent work, based on banknotes and the "chopmarks" found on them...
April 28, 2014
April 11, 2014
From hawking his wares on the sidewalks of SoHo to showing them at the Whitney Biennial, the sculptor Alma Allen has taken the road less traveled to art world stardom...
April 1, 2014
The artist's poetic, seductive vessels step into the spotlight at the 2014 Whitney Biennial...
April 1, 2014
March 19, 2014
March 13, 2014
Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara has brought his trademark paintings and drawings of cute, impossibly cool kids—most of them girls—to Culver City’s Blum and Poe gallery seven times since the mid-1990s...
March 12, 2014
The oil paintings of Kazumi Nakamura — sometimes visually simple as the works of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, and at other times as complex as a Jackson Pollock...
March 1, 2014
Everyday life is full of voids: the suspended nowhere of idling in traffic, the serpentine line at the post office, the dreary waiting room at the dentist’s, 3:00 am insomnia...
January 16, 2014
The birthplace of Mono-ha, the conceptual art movement that dominated the fledgling galleries of Tokyo from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, is widely considered to be Nobuo Sekine’s Phase Mother Earth, a stoic cylindrical column of earth shadowed by its negative...
January 1, 2014
January 1, 2014
December 11, 2013
After six research trips to China and 100 gallery visits between 2001 and 2012, the Rubell Family Collection gained more than 30 new pieces of contemporary Chinese art by 28 artists...
December 2, 2013
Japanese neo-Pop pioneer Yukinori Yanagi has had relatively low international visibility in recent years. After his definitive return to Japan from New York in 2000, his work took on an altogether different scale, both temporally and spatially, involving the artistic transformation of industrially despoiled, semiabandoned volcanic islands in Japan’s Inland Sea...
November 27, 2013
The nooks and crannies of consciousness take center stage in Jim Shaw's multi-gallery exhibition at Blum and Poe. Metaphors mix promiscuously, as do materials, references and emotions...
November 1, 2013
October 12, 2013
If contemporary art seldom concerns itself with religious (as opposed to fuzzily spiritual) life, then the work of Alexander Tovborg might be understood as an attempt at restitution...
October 1, 2013
Romanian artist Victor Man’s first solo exhibition with this gallery succeeds in restoring the bourgeois interior of the space’s previous incarnation as a nineteenth-century opulent dwelling while simultaneously depicting a dark and somewhat melancholic world...
September 22, 2013
The work of Japanese artist Koji Enokura comprises a veritable taxonomy of stains. Enokura’s first solo exhibition in North America featured two bodies of work: documentation of ephemeral “interventions” from the early 1970s, when he was affiliated with the Mono-ha group, and large-scale pieces from the 1980s and ’90s that meld painting and sculpture...
September 1, 2013
Kōji Enokura was a maker of symptoms and stories. His symptoms, fleeting performances captured in photos, became, with time, stories: sizeable wall pieces blackly hanging between painting and sculpture...
August 8, 2013
To say I was unprepared for Darren Bader's installation at Blum & Poe is an understatement. I had read the coy, poetic/philosophical press release and was looking too closely at the unusual checklist to notice a low-hanging warning sign...
July 22, 2013
July 18, 2013
Artist Linda Montano became the Chicken Woman in 1971. She made nine clandestine appearances around San Francisco wearing a blue and white prom dress with tulle and a feather headdress that resembled, at first glance, the close-cropped perm of an elderly lady...
June 14, 2013
May 28, 2013
Anya Gallaccio returns to Artpace 16 years after her International Artist-in-Residence project with This much is true, an installation of four cubic sculptures at the Hudson (Show)Room...
May 18, 2013
Artist Sam Durant, who will be honored at this year's 39th Venice Family Clinic's Art Walk & Auctions this Sunday, chatted with us about his own experience with the clinic, his controversial art piece "Scaffold," and the debate over the limits of creativity...
May 1, 2013
March 7, 2013
The large, bold, unabashedly painterly paintings of Henry Taylor find a fitting stage at Blum & Poe. Spaciously hung in high-ceiling rooms, interspersed with a handful of found object sculptures, the paintings have a potent presence...
March 1, 2013
March 1, 2013 – March 1, 2019
Gokita’s black and white paintings simultaneously suggest nostalgia for a time past and gone, where fantasy has replaced reality to create fantastical neo-surrealist abstract/figurative hybrid works...
January 18, 2013
January 18, 2013
This past December in a follow-up to its successful spring show, “Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha,” Blum and Poe mounted a retrospective of one of the movement’s pivotal figures, Kishio Suga...
January 11, 2013
Like most kids, I grew up with very few real role models. The thing I always wanted to be was an athlete: first a football player, then a baseball player like my cousin, Don Buford...
January 8, 2013
Matt Saunders’s innovative commission for Tate Liverpool, “Century Rolls,” aims to deconstruct boundaries between photography and painting...
January 4, 2013
The characters in the 1920 silent thriller The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which the title character keeps a somnambulist captive in a cabinet to carry out murder in his sleep, spin hypnotically around a soundstage filled with painted set pieces...
January 1, 2013
Sometime in the 1990s, the critical mandate of the prior decade’s “appropriation art” underwent a casual revision by an emerging generation less inclined to feel itself victimized by the “society of the spectacle.”
December 12, 2012
On the heels of last spring’s “Requiem for the Sun,” the excellent survey of Mono-ha, Blum & Poe has once again teamed up with curator Mika Yoshitake for a retrospective of a key participant in the loose-knit group, Kishio Suga...
November 12, 2012
It’s been a crazy year for Jim Shaw. In January, having drastically downsized his legendary atelier community in the wake of the economic crash, he moved out of the studio that had produced some of Los Angeles’s most ambitious and monumental artworks of the past decade...
November 1, 2012
Given the seismic shifts that rocked Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art over the summer, wandering through “Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974” felt a bit uncanny...
October 14, 2012
Walking into Friedrich Kunath's show at Blum & Poe is like stumbling into a dream that is at once madcap and melancholy...
September 28, 2012
The conceptual art world of the 20th century produced a number of revolutionary movements that exploded like fireworks, then faded equally rapidly. One of the more engaging of these movements is memorialized in an elegant museum in a quiet suburb of Amsterdam...
September 13, 2012
Born in England, Penny Slinger emerged from art school in 1969, a time when lots of liberations were under way, including the nascent women’s movement...
May 6, 2012
With nearly 400 works, “Carroll Dunham: A Drawing Survey” stands out as one of the year’s largest shows. It’s also one of the best...
March 12, 2012
Yoshitomo Nara, one of Japan's top contemporary artists, spent much of last year mired in a creative crisis...
March 1, 2012
One of the cats hid under the couch. But the sweet black-and-white one cuddled and played. They were up for adoption from the SaveKitty Foundation of Queens, New York, and they were sculptures by Darren Bader...
February 2, 2012
The putative gap between art and life is a pernicious myth. Painting in a studio is no less a form of life than, say, occupying Wall Street. Consider the exuberantly vital art of Henry Taylor, whose paintings are in an exhibition named for him at MoMA PS1...
December 8, 2011
The title of Matt Saunders’s current show, “China in Nixon” turns the title of John Adams’s 1972 opera into abstract absurdity. The title’s inverted place and figure, references performers who are improbably filled, indeed enlivened, by space...
September 29, 2011
Each of the six new sculptures by Matt Johnson goes for a grab-your-lapels impact, only to slowly unfold in more subtle complexities...
June 1, 2011
After the opening last year of the Lee Ufan Museum – a collaboration with the architect Tadao Ando on Naoshima Island, Japan – and ahead of his largest retrospective to date, at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lee Ufan talks to Melissa Chiu about his five decades as an artist, writer and philosopher...
May 1, 2011
April 21, 2011
In his latest show at Blum & Poe, Florian Maier-Aichen continues his exploration of landscape, creating a poetic meditation on the line between painting and photography, abstraction and representation...
March 28, 2011
During its run at the Hammer Museum this winter, Julian Hoeber’s Demon Hill (2010) attracted around 17,000 visitors, something of a record for the Hammer Projects series...
March 1, 2011
March 1, 2011
Located across the street from his family home, a single-room storehouse has been Gokita’s workplace for the past seven years. “I found it by complete chance,” he says. “I’d walked by so many times but never really paid much attention to it. One day I looked inside, spoke to the owner, and I’ve rented it ever since."...
January 15, 2011
The last time Yoshitomo Nara’s cute ’n’ angry girls appeared in New York in a big way, they were under the umbrella of “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture,” Takashi Murakami’s provocative show at the Japan Society in 2005...
July 12, 2010
I don't really know where that comes from and I'm trying hard not to find out. Maybe I'm in the middle of my personal West Coast fever dream...
July 1, 2010
May 1, 2010
February 23, 2010
December 7, 2009
Carroll Dunham is working blue. That fact won’t shock fans of the painter—he arrived, in the eighties, with polymorphously perverse abstractions that gave way to a ribald world of phallus-faced men—but his new show at Gladstone just might...
October 1, 2009
When the artist Robert Colescott passed away this June in Tucson, where he had lived since 1985, he left behind a body of work that troubles many of the antinomies haunting Western art and its institutions...
October 1, 2009
June 17, 2009
June 1, 2009
Dave Muller’s sixth solo outing at Blum & Poe was the latest chapter of the artist’s ongoing project of chronicling the contents of his bookshelves and record collection...
March 1, 2009
Lee Ufan cut a sober but gracious figure as he contemplated the installation of his new paintings and sculptures, on view last fall at New York gallery PaceWildenstein’s cavernous Chelsea space...
January 14, 2009
There are a lot of artists who make funny art, or even funny-looking art— Richard Prince comes to mind on one end; Gelitin on the other. But very few artists make viewers laugh out loud like Los Angeles-based artist Matt Johnson...
December 1, 2008
November 25, 2007
January 1, 2007
Rendered in colored pencil, Mark Grotjahn’s large drawings approximate human scale—meeting the viewer eye-to-eye, as it were—and feature skewed versions of the perspectival triangle. As in traditional perspective, the shapes’ orthogonals meet at a vanishing point, but in Grotjahn’s work they don’t converge neatly; they’re irrationally “off.”
January 1, 2007
I think that maybe for me it’s more about going into my own personal history than finding a relationship between the work and psychoanalysis...
October 13, 2003
The painter Harvey Quaytman, who died last year at the age of 64 after a long illness, was an unspectacular fixture of the New York art world for close to 40 years. If “unspectacular” seems an odd or callous adjective, especially in light of the artist’s recent passing, please understand that I mean it as a compliment...
April 1, 2003
April 1, 1997
This interview is from the brochure for the exhibition Harvey Quaytman, New Works September 25-November 2, 1997 at the ICA at Maine College of Art...
May 1, 1979