Blum & Poe

Blum & Poe Broadcasts presents a tribute to the late Nobuo Sekine, one of the central figures of the Mono-ha movement in Japan. This month marks a year since his passing.

Engaging directly with this shared global experience of pandemic-motivated social distancing, Blum & Poe Broadcasts, Dave Muller, and Three Day Weekend present an online group exhibition titled "The Gallery is Closed." A number of artists and members of our community have contributed personal drawings and public signs that announce closure and reflect a multitude of absent voices and voices in waiting.

Blum & Poe Broadcasts presents a focus on the practice of Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa, in conjunction with her first US museum exhibition currently installed at Ballroom Marfa, Texas. Like many other museums today, Ballroom Marfa is now closed indefinitely—this Broadcast is intended to share significant work that would otherwise be on view to the public.

BLUM is pleased to present "Sticks and Stones," Berlin-based artist Tom Anholt’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Anholt makes paintings that straddle the line between the semiotic implications of representation and the ineffable emotive qualities of abstraction. Referencing the artist’s curated repository of tropes and imaginary settings, each work on linen places a strong emphasis on composition and the hand. This signature style breaks each scene down to its most essential spatial components of form, light, and color—affective gestures that accumulate and transform recognizable symbols. Partially alluded to in the exhibition title, the symbol of the tree is one of the predominant signifiers in "Sticks and Stones." Formally used as a device around which to build receding depths, "Contemplation" (2023) or "Perfect Day" (2023) depict trees and their branches as dark, snaking lines which route from end to end of the linen’s most forward-pushing interior. Receding from these meandering twigs are mid-plane horizon lines which separate glistening bodies of water from rolling hills. On a personal level, trees also represent the artist’s twin sister Maddy, who began a battle with brain cancer just as Anholt started his first work for this exhibition. That precursory painting, "Twin Branches (For Maddy)" (2023), is a tribute to her, and functions as the narrative beginning of the show. As Maddy’s condition advanced, the artist began to see the person he had known wane—she left this world just as Anholt was finishing the exhibition’s concluding work, "Drifting Away" (2023). Telling a story of resilience and strength, "Sticks and Stones" honors Maddy’s life—capturing the unutterable emotions and simple moments of closeness tied to the universal experience of losing a loved one. Viewing painting as a healing process, Anholt often takes as his subject matter the types of contemplative pastoral nature scenes favored by painters of the Romantic era. Key elements of these landscape paintings are blue pools of flowing or still water next to vibrant green fields. Each quadrant of the work functions as an abstraction with ambling brush strokes of greater or lesser pigmentation, imitating the natural qualities of light as it reflects. Seeded into these swatches of painterly marks is the occasional tiny figure, calling to mind the allegorical scenes of Caspar David Friedrich. Most of the vignettes in "Sticks and Stones" take nighttime as their setting, employing the rich, darker palette required to indicate the absence of light. Simultaneously, the moon appears in many of these works—a twinkling orb or crescent that commands attention by means of its striking contrast with its shadowy environment. As much a recurring character as it is a motif or geometric abstraction, this moon unites the splintered factions of the painting schools from which Anholt draws reference. Like the Romantic painters of times past, Anholt conveys personal sentiment and an interest in the natural world. Like the Abstract Expressionists, he uses gestures that call attention to his medium. Anholt unites art history, allegory, natural imagery, and an emotive palette to under the umbrella of his own visual language. Tom Anholt (b. 1987, Bath, UK) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He holds a BA from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, UK, and studied at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Sweden. Anholt’s work was the subject of the solo presentation "Time Machine" at Kunstverein Ulm, Germany (2018) and featured in group presentations at the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2020); and KH7 Artspace, Arhaus, Denmark (2018). His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Collection Majudia, Montreal, Canada; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; and M Woods, Beijing, China.

BLUM is pleased to present "Circle of Confusion," Brooklyn-based artist Sam Moyer’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. “The circle of confusion” is a term used in photography and film to define and measure what is in or out of focus in a picture. It is an area where a point of light grows to a circle that you can visibly see in the final image, in which the size of the circle determines the sharpness of the image. In the circle of confusion, ideas come in and out of focus. The closer and smaller the idea, the more acute and sharp the opinion, the action; the broader and wider the scope is, the blurrier the feelings, the greater the overwhelm and failure to process, but still an understandable image—all within the circle of confusion. I started making these paintings in 2020 as a solution to a problem. It was a moment when the broader scope was too hard to hold. The narrowing of focus to the work of brush strokes and intuitive response tightened the circle of confusion for me. Since 2020, the circle has expanded and contracted. As I write this, I am feeling overwhelmed again, grateful for this task to sharpen focus. These paintings have a limited palette centered around Payne’s Gray, a color that represents the cold reflective light of “magic hour,” the moment after the sun has set, before it’s dark—when the light is a soft blue. This in-between light emphasizes contrast while simultaneously flattening the world. I never studied painting. I have sort of forged my way through this new relationship with oil paint via advice and guessing, but the material has revealed a direct tactile play with light that I have always sought from the existing surfaces of materials. In photography and stone, a relationship to light is inherent to the process, or comes directly from the source, but with painting, I have the control. Utilizing different techniques of application, I can get the surface of the paintings to reflect or absorb light in configurations that are only revealed as the viewer walks around the work, engaging the body, returning the painting to its objecthood and its relationship to the three-dimensional world, and sculpture. The images and patterns of the paintings exist in my mind in a form of haunting. Another circle of confusion, they hold a soft edge while in the realm of imagination and tighten as I start the actual work of laying down paint. I pull focus through process, allowing the material to aid in the work’s direction. Upstairs, seven new photographic works are on view. The images in this series are of eroded sea walls that were built on the beaches of Gardiners Bay on Long Island, using the stones of the beach as the aggregate in the concrete mixture. As time and water have moved over them, the structure of the walls has degraded into free-formed shapes. They have lost their protective function but, in so, have been transformed into site-specific sculptures— a collaboration between the human hands that made the walls and the forces of nature that have been breaking them down. I have framed the photographs in concrete using the same beach stones as aggregate. The frames take on the role of representing what these forms once were, holding the image of their trajectory. —Sam Moyer Sam Moyer (b. 1983, Chicago, IL) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her BFA from the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, DC, and her MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT. Her work has been featured in national and international exhibitions such as at the Drawing Center, New York, NY; the Bass Museum, Miami, FL; University Art Museum, University at Albany, NY; Public Art Fund, New York, NY; White Flag Projects, St. Louis, MO; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; LAND, Los Angeles, CA; and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden. Moyer’s work is held in numerous prominent collections, including the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France; Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

BLUM is pleased to present "Chorus," Los Angeles-based artist Simphiwe Ndzube’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Expanding the reaches of his surrealist Mine Moon universe—the fictional location that has long functioned as the setting for the artist’s otherworldly vignettes—"Chorus" sees Ndzube adding new tropes and mark-making techniques to his visual lexicon. Where Ndzube would previously adhere multimedia objects to acrylic on canvas, in this exhibition, he perfects his use of oil paint through carving, manipulating finishes to convey a pointillist effect, or adding sand to build out from the canvas. The artist’s subject—Black choral music traditions in South Africa—serves as a vehicle, advancing Ndzube’s storyline and making space for new painterly techniques. Growing up in post-apartheid Cape Town, the artist has long been inspired to represent the underrepresented individuals who exist within systems of oppression—those who go unheard. Chorus marks the debut of a new series in which Ndzube explores the notion of the voice, both literal and figurative. Black choral music traditions in South Africa are deep-seated and proved to be a pivotal tool for expressing resistance during apartheid. "Amakwaya," a type of South African choral music, refers to a traditional Zulu choir that promotes Zulu culture, incorporating indigenous percussion instruments and styles. Chorus is the first installment in a new series that Ndzube has titled "Amakwaya," as it takes the culture and imagery associated with musical stylings of the same name as its subject matter. "Chorus’s" use of oil paint is relatively new within the artist’s established oeuvre. Ndzube had previously favored acrylic for its quick drying precision and vibrance. For the artist, oil paint aligns with the fantastical qualities inherent in music in that it is more mercurial, malleable in its finish, and able to be manipulated for longer periods of time. These properties are on full display in Ndzube’s smaller-scale canvases "Chorus #1," "Chorus #2," and "Chorus #3" (all 2023)—the vibrantly colored robes of the chorus members ripple and pop where the artist has intervened to create a dimple-like effect in his paints. The theme of gestalt echoes through these three works, as well as the whole show, in that each figure is at once immediately recognizable as well as visually divisible into a multitude of innovative and intricate marks on canvas. While Ndzube introduces many new techniques and ideas in "Chorus," he also returns to some of his powerful recurring imagery such as a flower that is both lotus and calla lily, the corpse flower, and boats at sea—all of which played major roles in his most recent solo institutional exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. These forms act as anchors for the Mine Moon—establishing the viewer in Ndzube’s surrealist universe and its critique of apartheid and the residuals of colonialism. In "Dead Father, A Cry Song for the Nation." (2023), Ndzube depicts a chorus of mourners in the Mine Moon, where the lotus and calla lily hybrid flower is native fauna, as they grieve the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. "Chorus" indicates a major turning point for Ndzube. It is his first solo exhibition with BLUM, debut of the "Amakwaya" series, and the premier of these new techniques and personal symbols. The combination of these elements conveys visually the audible experience of music—its associated customs and inherent whimsical qualities—as well as continues to build the artist’s distinct perspective within the magical realist discourse as a new source of recourse against structures of injustice. Simphiwe Ndzube (b.1990, Eastern Cape, South Africa) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Cape Town, South Africa. He received his BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Arts in 2015. Recent solo exhibitions include "Oracles of the Pink Universe," Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO (2021); "The Rain Prayers," Museo Kaluz, Mexico City, Mexico (2019); "Bhabharosi," The Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL (2018); and "Waiting for Mulungu," CC Foundation, Shanghai, China (2018). His installation "In the Land of the Blind the One Eyed Man is King?" (2019) was included in the 2019 Lyon Biennale. His work is collected by the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, Geneva, Switzerland; HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, France; Rubell Museum, Miami, FL; Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa; among many others.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present “‘Pictures Girls Make’: Portraitures,” an exhibition bringing together over fifty artists from around the world, spanning the early nineteenth century until today. Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, this prodigious survey argues that this age-old mode of representation is an enduringly democratic, humanistic genre. 
 
“Pictures girls make” is a quip attributed to Willem de Kooning who purportedly dismissed the inferior status of his wife Elaine’s portrait practice. [1] Inverting the original dismissal into an affirmation, “Pictures Girls Make” is a rallying cry for this exhibition which examines how different forms of portraitures defy old aesthetic, social, and ideological norms. 
 
Both historically and contemporarily speaking, the portrait has always been far more than a rendering of a specific person’s likeness. Portraiture engages with ideas of identity, subjectivity, and agency. Moving beyond binary thinking, the exhibition strives to emphasize the diversity of subjects, complexities of biography, and array of individual characters that artists have been able to capture through various modes of portrait making. 
 
Gatekeeping through Genre 
 
Gatekeeping is as old as art itself. For centuries, the policing of pictorial genres has been an effective means of wielding power and enforcing artistic hierarchies along gender, race, and class lines. In the Western European tradition, portraiture was the reserve of the elite: executed by a specialized cadre of male artists and supported through commissions by the aristocracy, the clergy, and merchant classes. Despite the hegemony of the genre’s origins, a close re-reading of the history of portraiture and its continued vitality has overturned its privileged, homogenous foundations. 
 
“It is very wonderful that a woman’s picture should be so good,” proclaimed Albrecht Dürer in 1521 after first learning about the existence of painter Susanna Horenbout. Those rare women artists who gained professional stature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were often disparaged as “copying” their male peers, revealing “the weakness of the feminine hand” as critics remarked of Dutch Golden Age artist Judith Leyster when she was compared to her male counterparts. Impressionist artist Marie Bracquemond, who was trained by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, wrote in her diary, “The severity of Monsieur Ingres frightened me… because he doubted the courage and perseverance of a woman in the field of painting… He would assign to them only the painting of flowers, of fruits, of still lifes, portraits and genre scenes.” Relegating women artists to “minor” art forms as well as essentializing claims about ALL women painters’ inferior skills have shaped the art historical canon for generations. Fifty years of feminist art historical scholarship has only recently begun to successfully push back against the gatekeeping that has kept women—and non-white European—artists in the shadows. 
 
Elaine de Kooning was no stranger to this type of gender/genre policing. Her distinctive portraiture practice was a direct response to the gatekeeping at work in her own artistic partnership. While she was a rare postwar artist that would confidently oscillate between figuration and abstraction, Elaine de Kooning embraced portraiture—“pictures that girls made”—as her chosen genre. Against the backdrop of Abstract Expressionism’s macho bravura, Elaine de Kooning was compelled to stake out autonomous ground. Her distinctively brushy, expressive portraits were a powerful riposte to her husband’s gendered gatekeeping. 
 
Drawing upon revisionist histories that have uncovered forgotten or repressed artists, as well as through the range and diversity of artists working today, it can be argued that portraiture has always been an enduringly democratic, deeply humanistic genre. Both historically and contemporarily, portraiture has the capacity to capture a multitude of subjectivities, identities, and agencies. What was once considered a lesser form of painting, portraiture must be understood as a powerful vehicle for exploring human complexities. Portraiture was and is made by painters of every possible race, ethnicity, caste, and sexuality. They are also made by gender-fluid, non-binary artists. Straight white men still make them. Portraits are pictures people make. 
 
Old Portraits, New Canons 
 
At least historically speaking, the de Koonings were righter than they realized. Portraits are pictures girls make—going all the way back to the sixteenth century. The Flemish painter Caterina van Hemessen made the first-ever self-portrait as an artist at her easel in 1548—giving birth to a crucial genre of the palette self-portrait, the ultimate means of asserting artistic legitimacy and self-promotion. In her wake, Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Élisabeth Louise Vigée LeBrun, among other Old Mistresses, have made emblematic contributions to this genre while asserting their authorship and professional standing. 
 
Catalyzed by feminist scholarship, a new canon forged from old portraits has emerged: forming the conceptual core of “‘Pictures Girls Make.’” Pictures of really important girls. This exhibition is an homage to these Old Mistress foundations. Specially created for “‘Pictures Girls Make,’” Chris Oh’s painting on antique glass, entitled “Spectacle” (2023), reprises Sofonisba Anguissola’s iconic self-portrait (1556) at her easel with brush and maulstick in hand. Acknowledging this new art historical canon, Oh’s work poignantly pays homage to the pioneering role women artists have historically played in this specific and powerful form of self-representation—a trope that is extensively explored in a range of studio self-portraits. These include an important self-portrait by Mela Muter—the first professional Polish-Jewish artist—who depicted herself in her Montparnasse studio (1915); June Leaf’s studio scene “Broome Street (Sheila in the Studio)” (1969-70); and Somaya Critchlow’s fictionalized, nude self-portrait “X Studies the work of Pythagoras” (2022). Ranging in style from Surrealism and magical realism to more quirky, cartoony styles, a number of powerful artist self-portraits constitute an important trope in the exhibition with works by Gertrude Abercrombie, March Avery, Joan Brown, Robert Colescott, Juanita Guccione, Sally J. Han, Agata Słowak, and Katja Seib, among others. 
 
Identity Politics: A Double-Edged Sword 
 
The complex impact of identity politics on artistic discourse is at the heart of “‘Pictures Girls Make’”—particularly the many ways in which identity-based organizing has promoted diversity, demanded equality of representation and opportunity, raised awareness of specific group struggles, and have forced changes to socio-political power structures. Yet while a motor for political and representational change, identity politics presents a double-edged sword—something that is sometimes played out in the instrumentalization and oversimplification of portraiture. The sometimes-reductive nature of identarian thinking often flattens complexity—boiling down discussion of an artwork to checking a box of gender, race, or sexuality—obscuring other meanings, aesthetics, and potential universal human values contained within the work. 
 
A critical ambivalence about the progress and limits of identity politics thus informs this exhibition. How can portraiture function both as an emblem of social change and simultaneously be considered as an autonomous, complex painting that speaks to the history of art in its own right? Or in the words of Kerry James Marshall, “How do you address history with a painting [whose subject] that doesn’t look like Giotto or Géricault or Ingres, but without abandoning the knowledge that painters had accumulated over the centuries?” Speaking about the duality of Marshall’s contribution to representations that exceed the reductionism of identity politics, Carroll Dunham writes, “[Marshall is able to] simultaneously occupy a position of beauty, difficulty, didacticism, and formalism with such power.” As these two artists’ thoughts attest, the entwinement of formal and conceptual complexity is the only way to evade the oversimplification and pigeonholing of portraiture’s importance when discussed only through an identity politics lens. 
 
Catalyzed in large measure by the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement, the art market, alongside museums, have rapidly embraced Black artists over the past few years—particularly emphasizing Black figurative painters. Whether spurred by political awakening or cynical opportunism, the race to foreground “new” artists of color has been driven mostly by a narrow focus on Black subject matter, while egregiously ignoring the complex histories of artists of color. This amnesic approach to contemporary Black artists has mostly overlooked the crucial handful of artists of African ancestry working in Africa, Europe, and America who were known before the  twentieth century—the seventeenth-century painter Juan de Pareja, the Neoclassicist Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, Henry Ossawa Tanner, and sculptor Edmonia Lewis are notable exceptions. 
 
“‘Pictures Girls Make’” pays homage to this history by featuring an important early portrait by Joshua Johnson (1763-1824), the earliest known African American professional artist. A formerly enslaved, freeman of color, Joshua Johnson eventually made a career as a portraitist in Baltimore where his clients were among the city’s vibrant merchant and middle classes. “Portrait of a Woman” (date unknown) portrays a now-unknown white lady who is dressed in her finery. The portrait features all the hallmarks of Johnson’s signature style—finely rendered details like her lace collar, her facial features and jewelry as well as a distinctive palette. Including Johnson’s work along with “Portrait of a Creole Gentleman” (circa nineteenth century) by an unknown artist of the Louisiana School [possibly a follower of Julien Hudson (1811-1844)] is intended to be a genealogical gesture that gives some context to a range of twentieth and twenty-first-century artists of color who have taken up the portraitist mantle—from twentieth-century trailblazers like Benny Andrews, Ernie Barnes, and Winfred Rembert, to twenty-first-century artists like Patrick Eugène, Andrew LaMar Hopkins, Danielle Mckinney, Umar Rashid, and many others who draw upon their predecessors. “‘Pictures Girls Make’” will also include a selection of portraits by contemporary African artists such as Nigerian artist Chidinma Nnoli, South African artist Simphiwe Ndzube, and Ugandan artist Collin Sekajugo. 
 
Who Gets Portraitized? 
 
“People’s images reflect the era in a way that nothing else could,” proffered Alice Neel when speaking about her devotion to the genre. “When portraits are good art they reflect the culture, the time, and many other things…art is a form of history.” Neel was among a generation of artists who radically changed who got portraitized, and by extension, which histories were enshrined for posterity on canvas. Neel immortalized her Leftist comrades, working-class families, her neighbors in Spanish Harlem, heavily pregnant women, and queer artist friends. In the same spirit, many twentieth-century artists such as Benny Andrews, Maria Anto, Jerome Caja, Leonor Fini, Yannis Tsarouchis, and Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita painted individual subjects, groups or communities, allegorical or archetypal figures, or even themselves. Most of their sitters were not traditionally represented in mainstream art history. 
 
Looking backwards and forwards, “‘Pictures Girls Make’” will recontextualize a number of pioneering portraitists who escaped the narrow first draft of the past century as well as also surveying a wide range of contemporary painters. Far from “just girls,” an unprecedented diversity of contemporary artists who engage with portraiture have pushed the genre to capture the actual conditions, social structures, and day-to-day experiences that make up contemporary life while innovating a range of formal painterly languages. 
 
[1] This quote was first cited in Lee Hall, “Jaunty” in: Maria Catalano Rand, “Elaine de Kooning Portraits” (Brooklyn: The Art Gallery, Brooklyn College, 1991): p. 21.  
“‘Oh, yes,’ she said, speaking of Bill de Kooning, ‘Now, he wouldn’t consider painting portraits. I mean,’ she said, ‘Bill just always thought that portraits were pictures that girls made. So,’ she said, ‘I made portraits. I had that area free; I had it to myself; I didn’t have to make decisions. I knew I was going to make a portrait and It[sic] didn’t much matter of whom: once you are set to make a portrait, you’re free to make a painting.’” 
There is some question about the context and tone in which Willem de Kooning purportedly made this comment—it is possible that it was made in jest or with an ironic tone—though the sexism of that era has been well-documented and has been the subject of much scholarship. 


“The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually, as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.”
 
—Virginia Woolf, “The Waves”
 
Blum & Poe is pleased to present “Nightswimming,” London-based artist Christopher Hartmann’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. 
 
Hartmann’s paintings portray situations that are seemingly detached from specific time and space. These settings often imply physical interaction or dialogue but are imbued with conflicting moods of intimacy and alienation, the indistinct yet persistent feelings of unease latent to our oversaturated media landscape, and technology-mediated social connections. The construction of the painting itself mimics the layering processes of photo-editing software, with the built-up application of artificial color tones recalling the alienating luminosity of digital screens. 
 
This exhibition focuses on Hartmann’s interest in abstraction, beginning with a series of beds that appear to have just been left. These works evoke the vulnerability of sleep, the ambiguities of dream states, and the intimacy of physical relationships. Loaded with a heightened sense of emotion and reality, they inhabit a liminal space between fact and fiction, the reality of the present and memory of the past. The bed paintings are presented in dialogue with two seascapes. The myriad folds in the bedsheets mirror in the infinite ripples on the water’s surface, intimating different states of immersion—the consciousness suspended during sleep and the body suspended in water. 
 
The sense of absence conjured by the works in the first gallery gives way to the gradual introduction of a bodily presence in further paintings that alternately explore intimacy and isolation. One depicts two pairs of legs aligned within the rippling folds of white sheets. Another two show figures lying alone, their body language alternately inviting and more guarded. Subtly larger than life yet intimate and relatable, the looming perspectives of these compositions implicate the viewer as more than a merely detached observer. The final body of work on view presents close-ups of entwined hands, concluding the exhibition with gentle moments of touch bathed in natural light. 
 
Christopher Hartmann (b. 1993, Germany) is a German-Costa Rican artist living and working in London. He holds an MA in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins, London, UK and completed his MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK in 2021. He is a recent grantee from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2020) and resident of The Fores Project, London, UK (2020) and Nassima Landau Foundation, Tel Aviv, Israel (2022). Solo exhibitions of Hartmann’s work include “State of Life, May I Live, May I Love,” T&Y Projects, Tokyo, Japan (2022) and “What I Want to Say Is This,” Nassima Landau Foundation, Tel Aviv, Israel (2021). Selected group exhibitions include “Queering the Narrative,” Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen, Germany (2022); MFA Fine Art Degree Show, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK (2021); High Voltage, Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv, Israel (2020); and London Grads Now, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2020). 

Blum & Poe is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Ugandan artist Acaye Kerunen, her first solo presentation in the United States. This American debut follows Kerunen’s acclaimed showcase in Uganda’s inaugural national pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy in 2022, which received the biennale jury Special Mention award for best national participation. 
 
Drawing the viewer into Kerunen’s immersive, cross-disciplinary practice—one which includes visual art, curation, activism, acting, poetry, writing, and performance—this exhibition emphasizes a multifaceted approach to triumphant noncompliance in a postcolonial world. Stitching, appending, twining, and knotting several commissioned works into inclusive wholes, Kerunen drives her platform home via her means of production, imagery, and materiality. 
 
Aligning the process of its own production with activism in the service of environmentalism, resistance to colonial and patriarchal tendencies, and the dismantling of hierarchies that devalue women’s labor—Kerunen’s work addresses the greater good from the moment it is conceptualized, before it is even presented in the exhibition space. Taking a stand against climate change, the artist’s process includes communal living and materials sourced in the wetlands of her motherland, Uganda. Employing techniques Kerunen learned from her mother and the matriarchs before her, the artist constructs her work from coils of woven natural fiber that are articulated by women in her community. The individuals and philosophies called upon to make the work are living extensions of the art objects they produce, as the systems and utopias they create serve as Kerunen’s ever-evolving counterpoints against problematic structures of power. 
 
Kerunen’s physical objects ground the artist’s oeuvre, serving as touchstones and points of entry for the viewer to investigate the other, more transitory portions of the artist’s work such as her activism, production as a form of social practice, and performance. In this exhibition, the artist uses recurrent imagery to drive home the messages of resistance that she has emphasized throughout her practice. The form of the butterfly is alluded to in “Nyakotha - The one who flys off” (2023). The butterfly’s process, beginning as a caterpillar, is one that Kerunen uses to convey sentiments of transformation and growth. In other sections of the exhibition, Kerunen similarly uses repeating tropes such as the colors black and white to indicate unified division and mappings of her own body to explore the emotions ingrained in her various stances. 
 
Beyond the physical object and its means of production, Kerunen also engages in time-based and intangible mediums to achieve her end. As part of this exhibition, the artist deploys the moving image. This video work, an intangible media that is a relatively new form within the plastic arts, illustrates the way Kerunen has prioritized elevating types of art making that challenge the traditional canon. Whether using techniques that had been pigeonholed as craft or creating work that is partially evanescent, Kerunen’s force for change rings true in her wide-ranging choice of media. 
 
Layer upon layer of consideration and meaning is embedded in every inch of this exhibition. Each object, activation, or communication has been imbued with heritage, sentiment, and hope for a better future—from sustainable materials to partial articulation by underserved communities, impactful compositions to intangible practices. All these messages commingle—unifying in a resounding chorus—to chip away at and call attention to social orders that perpetuate inequity. 
 
Acaye Kerunen’s (b. Kampala, Uganda) work was showcased in the two-person exhibition “Radiance: They Dream in Time” in Uganda’s inaugural national pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2022) which received the biennale jury Special Mention award for best national participation together with France. She presented her first solo exhibition, titled “Iwang Sawa,” at the Afriart Gallery, Kampala, Uganda (2021). That same year, the artist participated in a curatorial fellowship supported by Newcastle University; Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda; 32° East, Kampala, Uganda; and Afriart Gallery, Kampala, Uganda. In 2018, she showed her interactive, collaborative installation “Kendu” (2018-present) at the Nyege Nyege Ugandan Culture and Music Festival. The artist holds a BS in mass communication from the Islamic University in Uganda, Mbale, Uganda. Kerunen lives and works in Kampala, Uganda. 

Blum & Poe is pleased to present “The Distances,” American artist Matt Saunders’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Los Angeles since 2014. 
 
Exploring the open border between painting and photography, “The Distances” sees Saunders delving further into his ongoing study of liminal spaces in the dividing lines that dictate visual art’s medium specificities. In pointing to the limitations of these categorical barriers, the artist engages with other observed dichotomies—proximity versus distance, immediacy versus mediation, or gaze versus counter gaze. Painterly gestures atop the photographic surface evoke touch and contact while vacillating between convergence and divergence with the image below. 
 
Oil paint has long been behind Saunders’s photographic process. It now takes the forefront. Each of Saunders’s works for “The Distances” begins with an oil painting on thin chiffon. Configured as a negative, wherein white is black and colors are inverted, these stretched paintings are taken into a darkroom and used to strain light onto photosensitive paper to make each photographic image. The resulting prints are brought back into the studio where paint is thoughtfully applied to their surface, thus the image comes together from both sides of the photo’s process. “The Distances (Joe)” (2022) shows well the steps behind its making. Vibrant aqua interventions press forward on the picture plane, partially obscuring an expressive, almost photo-realistic face. 
 
At each stage of his practice, Saunders activates an encounter between the image and the material that captures it. This chain of transference is not separate from the meaning of the work, which calls up themes of overlap, transformation, and the fluidity of constructed social categories such as gender. Humanizing these exchanges, the eyes of Saunders’s emotive subjects gaze upon the viewer as they are also gazed upon, almost daring equal and opposite perception. The artist created the bulk of these works in the solitude of the pandemic when the interpersonal seemingly became a lost art. In dialogue with his teaching, Saunders reflected on the performative and fluid versions of gender experienced by each generation; thus, the subjects in “The Distances” return to many of the foundational muses who he painted early on in his career. With this revisitation, he creates a channel through to his early work—marking his own stylistic transitions from early to midcareer. 
 
Matt Saunders (b. 1975, Tacoma, WA) is based between New York, Boston, and Berlin. He currently serves as a full Professor of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Recent solo exhibitions include “Currents 114: Matt Saunders,” Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2017); Tank Space, Shanghai, China (2017); “Century Rolls,” Tate Liverpool, UK (2012); and “Parallel Plot,” Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2010). Saunders was the 2022 recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Arts Purchase Prize, 2015 Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2013 Prix Jean-François Prat and 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Deutsche Bank Collection; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul, Turkey; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, UK; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. 

Blum & Poe, in partnership with the Estate of Thornton Dial, is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition showcasing the work of late artist Thornton Dial—his first major presentation in Los Angeles. 
 
Renowned for his innovations, Dial developed an unprecedented style by fusing gestural virtuosity with a spiritual commitment to found materials—a panoply of cast-off goods and items considered valueless or broken. Drawing on traditions not taught in formal institutions—the yard shows of the American South, patchwork quilting, and the gospel church—he created a visual and narrative language that reframes important moments in world history and encapsulates the Black experience in the American South during the artist’s lifetime. The resulting works balance personal, cultural, and universal meanings to give voice and imagery to systemic inequities both past and present. This retrospective exhibition takes viewers on a journey backwards in time through twenty-eight years of Dial’s career painting venerated retellings of Black American history—from slavery to Jim Crow and through the election of the first Black president. 
 
Like many of the works presented in the initial gallery, “Garden of Eden” (2015) is making its first ever public appearance. Painted in the artist’s last year of life, this work provides valuable insight into Dial’s reflections on his own mortality. As indicated in its title, “Garden of Eden” is a rumination on death—the Judeo-Christian Bible tells the story of Adam and Eve, the first humans, becoming mortal only when expelled from the garden. Painted in a contrasting palette of lilac, yellow, and grey, life’s impermanence is depicted here as neither good nor bad, but a swirl of both. Layering a single piece of fabric atop the spraypainted enamel on canvas over wood—an exercise in succinctness compared to the found-object assemblages from Dial’s earlier career—“Garden of Eden”’s construction also indicates the artist’s perception of his body’s mobility. Key symbols in the biblical tale include the tree of life, which allowed Adam and Eve eternal life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which produced fruit whose consumption resulted in Adam and Eve’s expulsion from divine paradise. “Garden of Eden”’s composition is primarily abstract, except for a single, nearly indiscernible houseplant. In the artist’s oeuvre, it is common to see seemingly mundane objects imbued with great meaning—as with this plant of humble origins that, here, represents both eternal life and the pathway to death. Ever an optimist, even while considering his own imminent passing, Dial creates a new allegory with this painting. He alludes to his own origins—born in a cornfield to an unwed teenage mother and working a half-century building highways, houses, and boxcars—to convey the great contributions that he and other Black voices have made in the realms of racial advocacy and culture despite having faced innumerable challenges along the way. 
 
In an adjacent room, a midcareer work titled “Hot and Cold (Life in the Rolling Mill)” (1995–96), exemplifies a through line from Garden of Eden to the artist’s earlier interest in the tenderness and humanity found in unlikely places. Representational of the artist’s signature assemblages, “Hot and Cold (Life in the Rolling Mill)” is an impressive symphony of scrap metal, wire mesh, fabric, clothing, carpet, a fly swatter, a toy tractor, twine, artificial hair, Splash Zone compound, spray paint, and enamel on canvas over wood. In this case, a steel mill acts as a lens through which to examine romantic relationships. Before becoming a full-time artist, Dial held a series of industry jobs, most notably working at the Pullman-Standard plant in Bessemer, Alabama for thirty years making boxcars. “Hot and Cold (Life in the Rolling Mill)” uses the steel forging process, in which the metal is heated to a very high temperature to make it malleable before being dropped into water to quickly cool and retain its shape, as a metaphor for the unpredictable nature of love. A man, constructed from scrap metal and bearing a mustache that resembles the facial hair Dial wore for much of his life, reaches toward a woman of the same material constitution wearing lipstick and a dress. Frozen in their move toward one another, the two never fully touch—a stance that recalls Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” and prompts a reconsideration of the nature of partnership. 
 
Relationships—between individuals, economic classes, genders, and races—have always been a key theme in Dial’s oeuvre. In an oil on canvas painting titled “Running with the Mule, Running for Freedom” (1990), presented here alongside his earliest works, the artist paints a Black man riding a mule and flanked by onlookers. In his early work, Dial often used animals to embody the othering, everyday ordeals of Black Americans. For a Black factory employee working in Bessemer around the time of the second Selma march, expressing opinions on racial inequity could have resulted in a loss of livelihood—or life. In “Running with the Mule, Running for Freedom” the mule is a symbol of the historic associations of Black Americans with work animals, commodities, and disposable labor. The mule is also a reference to Dial’s ancestors who, for generations, were sharecroppers on the plantation where Dial was born. The white figures in this work, not subject to the mule’s associations, look on with expressions of shock and sadness, indicating that Dial held out hope for interracial collaboration to overcome Black oppression. 
 
 Dial was a documentarian and orator of his own lived experience at a time of great tumult and change in his community. Beyond his important insights into twentieth-century Black life and culture, Dial’s work—from the beginning of his career as an artist to the end of his life—provides an astute and moving meditation on love, death, and the desire for more than one’s allotment. Reflecting on his contributions to art and culture, Dial said, “Since I been making art, my mind got more things coming to it. The more you do, the more you see to do... I believe I have proved that my art is about ideas, and about life, and the experience of the world.” 
 
 Thornton Dial’s (b. 1928, Emelle, AL; d. 2016, McCalla, AL) work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions across the nation, including the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL; traveling to Samford University Art Gallery, Birmingham, AL and Wiregrass Museum of Art, Dothan, AL (2022–23); Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH (2020); High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (2016); Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN (2011); New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA (2011); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2005); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (1993); American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY (1993); and was included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York, NY (2000). Dial’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among many more. 

Blum & Poe is pleased to announce “By Any Means Necessary,” an exhibition curated by Atlanta-based artist Lonnie Holley and featuring work by Holley, Louisiana Bendolph, Hawkins Bolden, Joe Light, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Rita Mae Pettway, and Mary T. Smith. This presentation accompanies “Handwriting on the Wall,” the first major exhibition in Los Angeles focusing on the work of Holley’s close friend and colleague, Thornton Dial, and honors their shared histories and passions. This show is presented in conjunction with “Lonnie Holley: If You Really Knew” at MOCA North Miami, Holley’s first major exhibition in the South and featuring work from this same cohort of artists he champions including Thornton Dial, Mary T. Smith, and Hawkins Bolden.

 “As an artist, it’s an honor to curate my first serious show on the occasion of my dear friend Thornton Dial’s first exhibition in Los Angeles. 

 This show, which also includes my own work, is a tribute to some of the many voices that cried out in the wilderness for so long. All the artists in the show—Louisiana Bendolph, Hawkins Bolden, Joe Light, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Rita Mae Pettway, and Mary T. Smith—were or are dear friends of mine and Mr. Dial and created works of art for the same reasons that we have: as a testimony about our lives and experiences growing up in the harsh reality of the South. 

 We all used different materials or means, based on what was available to us—the fabric scraps turned into patchwork quilts by Louisiana Bendolph and her mother, and many others in Gee’s Bend, Alabama; the found objects that Joe Minter transformed; or the tin from old barns that were recycled by Ronald Lockett and turned into something beautiful—all were used by us in our daily lives. We took something that had been discarded or cast aside and tried to give it new meaning and purpose, much the same as we tried to do with our own lives. I dedicate this show to William Arnett, who had the vision not only to support so many African American artists, but also to help us learn that we were part of something larger and that what we were doing really mattered.”  

— Lonnie Holley, 2023  

Louisiana Bendolph (b. 1960, Gee's Bend, AL) is an American quilt artist known for intricate compositions of an almost architectural or conceptual character and striking formal inventiveness. Bendolph’s instantly recognizable style exemplifies her lifelong immersion in the deep structures of design and pattern. Born and raised in Gee's Bend, Alabama, she learned her art at the feet of many women ancestors, including her mother (Rita Mae Pettway) and grandmother, who passed down to her their community’s generations-old, and now world-famous, quilting traditions. Bendolph works in other media, as well, including a 9’ x 16’ ceramic mural commissioned in 2015 by the San Francisco International Airport. Her quilts have been exhibited throughout the world and are in the permanent collections of numerous museums. She lives and works in Mobile, AL. 

 Hawkins Bolden (b. 1914, Memphis, TN; d. 2005, Memphis, TN) was a found-object sculptor from Memphis, TN. A childhood accident left him blind, able to sense only the presence of light, and ended his boyhood dreams of professional baseball. As an adult, Bolden created anthropomorphic “scarecrows” for his home garden in inner-city Memphis. These objects (he did not use the term “art”) range from minimal, mask-like forms to large, totemic constructions. They incorporate discarded metal cookware, garden tools, furniture, construction materials, appliances, machine components, and other scrapyard finds. These works are further elaborated with garden hoses, clothing, limbs of artificial Christmas trees, carpet scraps, shoe leather, toys, and other odds and ends, and are strategically patterned with punched holes that suggest human facial features such as eyes and mouths. 

 Lonnie Holley (b. 1950, Birmingham, AL) is based in Atlanta, GA. Holley's artworks encompass an expanse of mediums, including sculpture, drawing, painting, collage, and digital, as well as musical performance. His musical style is likewise diverse, blending blues, jazz, spoken word, funk, and folk idioms. His work has been celebrated for its complex storytelling and insights into issues of race, class, social justice, environmental disaster, and the transformative potential of art itself. Holley’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including at Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, FL (2023); Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX (2022); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY (2021); Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA (2017); Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art; Charleston, SC (2015); Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL (2004), and many more. His work is represented in major public collections worldwide including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; among many others. 

 Ronald Lockett (b. 1965, Bessemer, AL; d. 1998, Bessemer, AL) was an American visual artist. Born and raised in Bessemer, AL, he came of age after the civil rights movement had radically remade the political and economic landscape for Black Americans and for Lockett’s home region, the American South. Lockett’s artistic practice often explored the experience of “belatedness”—that is, of arriving too late to participate in the epic deeds and historic accomplishments of earlier generations. His “Traps” series, for example, uses whitetail deer, a species that has managed to survive amid human development and encroachment, as a proxy for himself and his Black peers whose lives felt immobilized by larger social forces. Lockett eventually gave up representational painting almost entirely to focus on compositions of cut tin, a unique process he developed by scavenging from the postindustrial environment of his Bessemer neighborhood. Lockett died in 1988 of complications from AIDS. 

 Joe Light (b. 1934, Dyersburg, TN; d. 2005, Memphis, TN) was an American painter and assemblage artist who worked in Memphis, TN. Light’s art combines elements from throughout pop culture, especially comics and cartoons, along with a debt to the genres of still life and landscape painting, with a strong affinity for the desert vistas of the American Southwest. Light encountered many of his influences during years of dealing bric-a-brac in flea markets, where he bought and sold everything from mass-produced kitsch to reproductions of well-known paintings from throughout the Western tradition. He ultimately invented a full-blown visual language to express his religious and moral convictions, using a personal iconography that includes flowers, mountains, rivers, birds, abstract glyphs, various alter egos, and signage. Light’s philosophical beliefs took shape in the 1960s, during a period of incarceration, when he converted to Judaism—more specifically, the texts and principles of the Old Testament, independent of formalized religion—through which he discovered guidance for navigating the challenges of life as a Black man in the modern American world. Light’s paintings are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among others.  

Joe Minter (b. 1943, Birmingham, AL) is an American sculptor and painter, based in Birmingham, AL, who is best known for a sprawling, outdoor art environment that he calls “African Village in America.” In 1989, Minter began building a sculpture garden (next to a Black cemetery where his family members are interred) as a memorial to what he terms the “foot soldiers” of the civil-rights movement—its unheralded change-agents. In the decades since, his vision has expanded to address issues of human rights and environmental justice on an international scale. Minter’s signature style mixes found-object assemblage and welded scrap metal, frequently accompanied by hand-lettered texts and bold, vivid paintings. With wit and optimism, his works juggle trenchant political commentary and a deep love of the natural world, all inspired by his Afrocentric worldview. Minter’s art is in the permanent collections of museums throughout the United States.  

Rita Mae Pettway (b. 1941, Gee's Bend, AL) is a quilt artist from Gee’s Bend, AL. From age four, after her mother’s death, Pettway was raised by her grandparents and aunts, who taught her to quilt. Her grandmother Annie E. Pettway produced some of the most important surviving Gee’s Bend quilts of the Depression era and served as a crucial artistic mentor to Rita Mae. Annie was reportedly fastidious about technique and craftsmanship but possessed an open-ended, freeform attitude toward pattern and composition. Rita Mae created her first full quilt at age fourteen and has carried forward the aesthetic principles imparted by her accomplished ancestors. Her daughter, Louisiana (Pettway) Bendolph, has in turn taken these approaches into new frontiers of design. Pettway’s quilts have been widely exhibited and are represented in museums including the Virginia Museum of Art.  

Mary T. Smith (b. 1904, Copiah County, MS; d. 1995, Hazlehurst, MS) was an American painter whose powerfully expressionist images of herself, her family and friends, plants and trees, and her pets and animals were created to adorn her home and roadside property in Hazlehurst, MS. Born in Copiah County, MS, she was the daughter of sharecroppers and grew up under segregation in the Jim Crow South. Essentially deaf since childhood, she was briefly married, had one child, and worked as a domestic servant. Smith lived alone and turned to painting later in life as a way to both identify and express herself to the world. She created nearly all of her surviving paintings in her seventies and eighties. While her themes are often local in their evocation of day-to-day existence, and at times devoutly religious in their proclamation of divine love and care, her paintings’ mix of personal humility and stylistic boldness possesses a tacitly political resonance. Smith’s paintings are in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other institutions. 

Blum & Poe is pleased to present “pedra,” Los Angeles and New York-based artist Asuka Anastacia Ogawa’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery.  This exhibition finds Ogawa diving further into her ongoing investigations of the spirituality that pulses though the natural world, the artist’s studies in ikebana, and the foremost religions in Japan. In the works presented here, Ogawa deploys her signature, childlike figures, depicting them in scenes of quiet meditation or rituals centered around natural talismans. Drawing on her knowledge of polytheist and animist practices in Japan and Brazil—where Ogawa spent her formative years—the artist paints a hyperbolized magical world filled with spiritual guides and plants with supernatural powers. This altered reality heightens and underscores the cultural overlaps in the artist’s experience, calling attention to the hyper-globalized state of the world and Ogawa’s encounters with reconciling multiple sociological influences.  Ogawa’s smaller paintings set the tone for this exhibition, emphasizing the significant attention paid to earthly forms: a red flower cranes in front of an olive-toned background. In her larger compositions, the artist’s characters have made potions or incenses that they apply to themselves and others as part of traditional Brazilian or Japanese customs. By ingesting botanicals or using them on their bodies, the players in Ogawa’s narrative oeuvre begin to merge with the natural world.  The artist’s depiction of practices involving organic totems foregrounds communion between humans and the earth—a central theme of this exhibition. For Ogawa, some of these rituals are personally witnessed accounts and some are imagined extensions of the cultural phenomena that she encountered living in Japan and Brazil. As the child of a Brazilian mother growing up in Japan, Ogawa recalls that her mother would often pray to angels. While only two percent of the Japanese populous identifies as Christian, the artist notes taking comfort in seeing her mother keep this practice. In “mochi” (2023) a figure shrouded in pink raises an offering of the Japanese rice cake mochi to the heavens.  Further threading the needle between religious practices in Brazil and traditions in Japan, “open” (2023) depicts a shaman and another figure flanked by flowers as they pray against a deep amethyst backdrop. In Japanese worship, it is commonplace to make offerings of flowers or food to the local shrine or the place of prayer in the home. Ogawa paints these floral offerings to nature, known as “kuge,” throughout the exhibition as her own form of reflective meditation and as a means of archiving this devotional practice.  Hinted at through backdrops derived from a dark and shadowy color palette, this new series offers weighty reflections on a personal period of change and growth for the artist. This transition, Ogawa notes, was catalyzed by her own encounters with these depicted rituals and traditions, which offered a deeper understanding of human nature and her own spatial roots.  Asuka Anastacia Ogawa (b. 1988, Tokyo, Japan) spent much of her childhood in Tokyo, Japan. When she was three years old, Ogawa moved from this vertical urban backdrop to rural Brazil, where she passed a handful of formative early years amongst wandering farm animals and rushing waterfalls. The artist later relocated to Sweden when she was a teen, where she attended high school, and soon thereafter she moved to London to pursue her BFA from Central Saint Martins. After having her first solo show at Henry Taylor’s studio in Los Angeles, CA in 2017, she had a solo show at Blum & Poe, Tokyo in 2020, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles in 2021, and Blum & Poe, New York in 2022. Her work is in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham NC, and X Museum, Beijing, China. She is currently based in Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY. 

Blum & Poe is pleased to present "I Went to See Myself but I Saw You," Los Angeles-based artist Julian Hoeber’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery. Many of the works presented in "I Went to See Myself but I Saw You" deploy geometric motifs, a device that Hoeber has used throughout his career, as part of a new series structured around the concept of stereoscopic vision—the process of seeing three-dimensionality derived from two eyes operating independently of one another. The paintings and sculptures presented here emulate this phenomenon, creating image pairs that are both unexpected and nuanced. These image pairs, placed side-by-side on a single panel or sculpture, expose the visual gymnastics required to see with two inputs: an experience that is both functional and imperfect. By hyper-focusing on and reframing the act of seeing, one begins to understand their perception of the world as fallible and constructed. Hoeber has a long-demonstrated interest in giving physical form to cerebral or internal experiences. Since the artist’s first exhibition with Blum & Poe in 2002, "Killing Friends," he has investigated the breakdown of inner versus outer and persistently exposed the faulty nature of popular cultural dichotomies. Beginning in 2020, Hoeber began researching and making paintings inspired by the work of Sir Charles Wheatstone. In 1838, Wheatstone invented the Wheatstone stereoscope, a device allowing independent right-eye and left-eye views at the same time. With this viewer, one could create the conditions for binocular rivalry: wherein the mind will try, often with great difficulty, to reconcile the two different images that it is seeing. Under these circumstances, human cognition triggers a contingent and shifting pattern of overlay between the two vignettes. Hoeber recreates this experience in the wall-mounted sculptures presented here, such as in "What Two Animals Are Most Alike?" (2023), which depicts both a rabbit and a duck. Depending on the viewer’s position, "What Two Animals Are Most Alike?" transforms—becoming part-rabbit and part-duck as the mind struggles to meld the input that it is receiving from each eye. Both the Wheatstone stereoscope and Hoeber’s investigations manipulate the act of looking to bring the viewer closer to understanding how the outside world is internally processed. Robert Smithson also cited Wheatstone’s stereoscope as a major influence on his two-part sculptural work "Enantiomorphic Chambers" (1965)—the studies for which are in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Of this sculpture, Smithson said, “To see one’s own sight means visible blindness.” In response to this statement, and to the work presented in "I Went to See Myself but I Saw You," Hoeber states, “I’d say that seeing one’s sight (something I agree is at the center of experiencing the Wheatstone viewer) is not so much visible blindness as necessitating a revision of regular sight as less trustworthy. I’m trying to get people right up to the surface of the contingency of their own vision.” In these works, Hoeber looks back at the history of painting, realizing that the single-point perspective used in the Renaissance period was meant to create a seamless and cohesive space by leaving out the complexities of what it is to truly see through two eyes. Binocular vision has two vanishing points that are made obvious when bifurcated by a device such as the Wheatstone viewer. The paintings that Hoeber presents in this exhibition each have two vanishing points, forcing onlookers to encounter them in steps—first one side, then the other. When interfacing with the geometric forms and small orbiting moon of "28 Days or 17 Miles" (2022), the eye is drawn to each side of the composition. This is the case with all of the paintings presented here, due to the artist’s recurrent use of multiple vanishing points. When confronting these paintings up close, the spectator naturally gets pushed to either side of the work, depending on which portion they are looking at. Hoeber offers this experience to the viewer—intending each panel as a device to produce this kind of two-part looking. "I Went to See Myself but I Saw You" resists Western picture making’s propensity for depicting a cohesive vision of the world. Hoeber acknowledges that these more traditional works leave out a great deal of complex information—for example, how the simple act of human sight actually goes through many steps in its journey from exterior to interior perception. In bifurcating the single vanishing point in his works through the logic of Wheatstone, stereoscopic vision, and binocular rivalry, Hoeber evokes an element of the sublime—an existential jolt that causes one to reconsider their own way of perceiving the world. As the artist puts it, “I’m interested in the idea that viewers and viewing are always slippery and a bit fractured.” Julian Hoeber (b. 1974, Philadelphia, PA) holds a BA in Art History from Tufts University, Medford, MA, a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, and an MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Hoeber’s work is featured in public and private collections internationally including Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; Rosenblum Collection, Paris, France; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; and the Western Bridge Museum, Seattle, WA. Julian Hoeber lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present "Fertile Plate," London-based artist Magdalena Skupinska’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Skupinska’s work draws from modernist traditions of biomorphic abstraction, arte povera, and minimalism to facilitate a reconnection with the essential multi-sensory experiences that stimulate the basis of our being. Deeply rooted in her surroundings, Skupinska’s work draws from a process of research and experimentation into the flawed, but present, symbiotic relationship between human and non-human forces in our shared world. The artist created this body of work as a collage of feelings, ideas, places, and sensations that manifested through intuition and stream of consciousness. Skupinska cites literature discussing flora, botanical medicine, and her own day-to-day relationship to plants as a major inspiration for her work. The resulting paintings are viewed by the artist as a collaboration between herself and the natural world. Skupinska’s abstract compositions emerge from the coming together of dynamic hues of paint formulated by the artist with purely organic materials, free of artificial substances. When concocting her paints, Skupinska’s ingredients range from ginkgo biloba, blue spirulina, to activated charcoal, and her selection is guided by varying intentions. A decision could be provoked by a color, a healing or nourishing property of a plant, the artist’s personal relationship with a plant, a texture, a scent, or simply intuition. Often, the different qualities—hue, meaning for the artist, or consistency—of disparate plants come together to create a single image. Time plays an important role in the creation of these works. Only when her paint dries does Skupinska know the true color of her paints due to her natural paint-making process. Even still, some paint mixes undergo a maturation process long after their application. Tests and experimentations are necessary to find the right botanical blend. Color is also of paramount importance to Skupinska in that it reflects the essence of the plants and their respective multi-sensory elements. In emphasis of the role that color plays in her work and its inherent relationship to the natural materials within her paints, Skupinska also stains the wood of her frames with corresponding plant mixes. This exhibition unites the artist’s encounters with the natural world—cataloging her endeavors as a botanist and relaying her musings on the symbiosis between humans and plants. Magdalena Skupinska (b. 1991, Warsaw, Poland) completed her BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, London, UK and her MA in Painting at Royal College of Art, London, UK. She has participated in residencies at Selebe Yoon, Dakar, Senegal; Fundación Casa Wabi, Oaxaca, Mexico; La Ira de Dios, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL. Her work has been the subject of international solo exhibitions and a monograph released in 2022.

“Abendlied” by Hanns Dieter Hüsch Butterfly is coming home Little bear is coming home Kangaroo is coming home The lights aglow, the day is done. Codfish is swimming home Elephant is walking home Ant is racing home The lights aglow, the day is done. Fox and goose are coming home Cat and mouse are coming home Man and woman are coming home The lights aglow, the day is done. All is asleep and all is awake, All is in tears and all is laughter, All is silence and all is chatter, And sadly, we’ll never know it all. All is screaming and all is listening, All is dreaming and then in life, All will be replaced again one day. Already the evening sits atop our home, Butterfly is flying home Wild horse is bolting home Older child is coming home The lights aglow, the day is done. Friedrich Kunath (b. 1974, Chemnitz, Germany) studied at the Braunschweig University of Arts, Braunschweig, Germany and now lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Kunath utilizes a personal style of romantic conceptualism, layering poetic phrases with poignant, often melancholy imagery. The work embraces comedy and pathos, evoking universal feelings of love, hope, longing, and despair. The artist’s personal journey from Germany to Los Angeles plays a key role in his work, incorporating German Romanticism and western popular culture, with still life, cartoon imagery, commercial illustration, nature photography, and lyrical references. The first major monograph devoted to Kunath’s life and work was published in 2018 by Rizzoli Electa, featuring contributions by James Elkins, James Frey, Ariana Reines, and John McEnroe. Kunath has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including "I’ll Try to Be More Romantic," Kunstsammlung Jena, Germany (2021); "Juckreiz," Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf, Germany (2016); "A Plan to Follow Summer Around the World," Centre d'art Contemporain d'Ivry - le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, France (2014); "Raymond Moody's Blues," Modern Art Oxford, UK (2013); "Your Life is Not for You," Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2012); "Lonely Are the Free," Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, Germany (2011); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2010); Kunstsaele, Berlin, Germany (2010); "7 x 14," Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany (2009); and "Home Wasn't Built in a Day," Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2009). His work is also featured in prominent public and private collections such as the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Pinault Collection, Paris, France; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among many more.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present Mexico-based artist Alma Allen’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. This show coincides with Allen’s solo museum presentation at Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City. Alma Allen is an American-born sculptor known for his orchestration of arresting gestural immediacy and distinctive material engagement, meticulously carved and cast to draw attention back to the work itself. This presentation marks the debut of Allen’s wall-hanging bronze reliefs. Works ebb and flow in both their shape and color, with reflective surfaces in a high-polish shine or patinas of a painterly soft black. Like rushing water, these sculptures spill out from their station on the wall, reaching toward the viewer, then recoiling back. Calling to mind the peaks and valleys of landscape and body, they offer both a muscular materiality and fluid sense of the expanded experiential plane. Centered amongst the bronzes is a single stone sculpture carved into shiny pleats from a local marble, revealing hues of rose, milk, and umber. Whimsical in form, oblong like a pickle or an eggplant, the soft shape of the work belies its notable weight, a suggestive joke within an abstract charge. In the adjacent garden stands a tall bronze among greenery—a visceral courtship of chaos, it twists in upon itself, both gleaming outwardly and withholding its innermost contents. Like a banyan tree, a bundle of twine, or the fibrous tissue that unites muscle with bone, the strands of this work seem to reflect objects from the natural world in a manner both familiar and infused with intimate notation. Its banded construction may very well reference the flowing lava produced by the eruption of Xitle, a volcano that destroyed Cuicuilco, one of the many pre-Hispanic cities that preceded Mexico City. In preparation for both this and his upcoming museum presentation, Allen explored parallels in his work and in Diego Rivera’s approach to designing the Anahuacalli Museum, his final work. On Rivera’s vision for the pyramid-like building built over lava flow, the museum states that his “genius lay in his ability to recognize... a unique combination of environmental features that constitute an identity that is inseparable from location: rock, earth, breath, blood, the quality of light.” Throughout Allen’s multi-leveled practice, these same qualities are flooded with a psychological valence. Within the collision of elements in Allen’s work is rooted a distinct series of repeated, recognizable gestures that allow poetics, mythologies, and narratives to emerge within the timeless qualities of sculpture and material. Relocating from Joshua Tree to Tepoztlán in 2017, Allen’s work has expanded into and absorbed his new environs, responding to the energetic forces near his studio. His proximity to Mexican stone quarries permits Allen to work directly not only in the carving but the selection of material. Along with his bronze foundry, Allen’s long dedication to making his work within his own studio has expanded craft notions of the handmade and cemented his reputation as a modern steward of classical sculptural techniques. This exhibition captures a recent chapter and takes it to its natural pinnacle—as Allen continues his exploration of symbolism and existential volatility in intricate forms whose weight, balance, and presence reconcile transient physicalities and inner visions against the eonic span. Alma Allen (b. 1970, Heber City, UT) currently lives and works in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Recent group exhibitions include "Intervención/Intersección," curated by Su Wu, Rockefeller Center, New York, NY (2022); "At The Luss House," The Gerald Luss House, Ossining, NY (2021); "At The Noyes House," The Eliot Noyes House, New Canaan, CT (2020); Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2018); deSaisset Museum, Santa Clara, CA (2016); and "2014 Whitney Biennial," Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2014). "In Conversation: Alma Allen & JB Blunk," a two-person exhibition that began at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA in February 2018, traveled to the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno in Spring 2019. A comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work was released by Rizzoli Electa in 2020.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present “Mirror Shy,” Brooklyn-based artist Anna Park’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in Los Angeles. This presentation coincides with Park's first solo museum exhibition “Last Call,” on view at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA. 

 Depicting her alter ego in a series of urbane, pared-down portraits, Park's newest work strains her distinct style through the visual vernacular of film and advertising. A New Yorker by way of Utah, Park channels perceptions of the cultural output of Los Angeles for this presentation, her first ever solo exhibition in the city of angels. The resulting illustrative works on paper on panel are confidently succinct in composition and rich in reference as they play with cultural perceptions of the body in relation to agency, voyeurism, and humor—tools Park uses to address topics that are otherwise difficult to broach.  In “Business as Usual” (2022), Park’s alter ego—with her heels on, nails done, and clothes seemingly off—drags the lifeless body of a massive hotdog into the composition’s frame. She stands against the checkerboard background of a picnic blanket beaming: it’s mealtime. This sausage, the same one depicted cradling “Mirror Shy”’s protagonist in “Sweet Nothings” (2022), serves as a place holder for male figures and a foil to the main character, revealing her struggles with intimacy and her ongoing journey to find personal empowerment. “Sweet Nothings” captures Park’s female lead in an ambiguous position—in a scene evoking Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Master of House” (1925), she stares at a wiener in a hat and suit with a look that calls her agency into question. Is she being seduced or is she the seducer? In a vignette that recalls and subverts Roy Lichtenstein’s “Drowning Girl” (1963), “This Could Be Us” (2022) reveals that “Mirror Shy”’s main character has the capacity and intention to overcome her challenges as she floats atop what remains of her frankfurter. 

 As a subset of Park’s exploration of agency, other works presented in “Mirror Shy” expand upon notions of pervasive voyeurism. Park investigates how one’s daily presentation can open the self up to scrutiny stemming from the impossible body standards pop culture constructs. In “Smells Like Roses” (2022), Park’s alter ego returns as a vessel that the artist puts through a test of self-exposure. Appropriating a pose from vintage exercise photographs, this painting postures a woman, hips on hands and legs toward the sky, for examination by a larger-than-life, ominous figure. Park presents this work as an analogy for body anxieties, with the background character representing the consistent social pressure that hangs over women. 

 Although it deals with difficult topics, “Mirror Shy” never loses its levity. A dark humor resonates throughout the exhibition by way of surrealism and hyperbole—a comedic effect is created when expectations are upended and impossibility replaces them. This is certainly the case with the character of the hotdog, but it is also present in “It’s Called Show Business” (2022), in which the central figure is trapped amongst several parading women’s legs. These repeating legs, a flashy yet unfeasible method for containment, are used by the artist to reference the setting of a culture where one is taught to assimilate or blend in. 

 Bringing the language of advertising into the fold of her practice, Park furthers her self-aware investigations into a society of commodity and surveillance. In moments of stillness that originate from a perspective rooted in empathy for her subjects, “Mirror Shy” signals to the viewer a newfound sense of control while continuing to address overarching themes in the artist’s oeuvre such as inner conflict, longing, and the one amongst the many. This exhibition marks a shift in Park’s narrative voice—arriving at the center of a world that she had previously looked in on from afar, she is now a participant in that which she actively critiques. 

 Anna Park lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her first solo museum exhibition, “Last Call,” is currently on view at the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA. She has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including “52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone,” Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT (2022); “Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (2022); “100 Drawings from Now,” The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2020); “Art on the Grid,” Public Art Fund, New York, NY (2020); “Drawn Together Again,” Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY (2019); among others. She received her BA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY and her MFA from New York Academy of Art, New York, NY. She is the First Prize Winner of the AXA Art Prize (2019) and the Grand Prize Winner of Strokes of Genius 11: Finding Beauty (2019). 

Blum & Poe is pleased to present a solo presentation with UK-based artist Linder. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in Los Angeles in nine years. 

 Since the 1970s, Linder has made sharp transformations to found images of the sexualized, commodified, and exploited body. For her latest exhibition “Sex-Pol,” titled after a sexual liberation movement helmed by Wilhelm Reich in the 1920s and ‘30s, Linder constructs her signature photomontages as visual explications of the vast complexities of desire across time and space. This investigation is rooted in distinct thematic universes that the artist philosophically inhabits. In three new series respectively titled Art and Industry, HE Shells, and Le Theatre—she delves into longing and resistance under 1930s fascist rule, previously examined in her works made for David O. Russell’s film “Amsterdam” (2022). In another, Linder explores the Ancient Greek concept of Eros as it plays out in contemporary pornography. With other works on view, she amplifies the performative eroticism and body confidence displayed in the stage aesthetic of artistic collaborators—that of Texas-based occult musical artist Rabit and ballroom influenced multidisciplinary collective the House of Kenzo. The installation unfolds in a color spectrum, which transitions from a silvery black-and-white to vivid hues of green and sienna. 

 Beginning with less saturation are the photomontages that developed out of her research for “Amsterdam.” While creating much of the artwork shown in Russell’s film, Linder ruminated on ways that a member of the fascist resistance in the 1930s might express dissent through visual art. Collecting objects from this period, such as a book documenting the work of dancer and choreographer Mary Wigman, she deployed her signature photomontage interventions to challenge authoritarian systems of power. The resulting series are called HE Shells, a military abbreviation for “high explosive shells,” and Art and Industry, which takes its name from Herbert Read’s iconic publication “Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design” (1935). Both groupings take as their base images of bodies in states of languid movement and shades of soft sepia and black-and-white. Linder intervenes by weighing down and disrupting these figures with depictions of mechanisms cut from Read’s book and cutouts of seashells. On this process, Linder notes: “For the research for David O. Russell’s film, it made sense to create images that would feel relevant to this present moment in time despite using archival prints… I didn’t start to work [on this series] until April this year when the war in Ukraine was into its second month. Reports of war crimes against women and girls were beginning to circulate.” The Le Theater series also channels this world, punning on the daily ins and outs of the operating theater. The theater functions as a container for these series, setting the scene for seemingly surreal abuses of power in the “Amsterdam” universe. 

 At the exhibition’s center, sits Linder’s series based on “Book X” of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” Here, Linder focuses specifically on the myth of Myrrha, one of the few female figures in mythology to carry the incest motif and often the subject of prints and paintings through art history. Invoking Myrrha’s change from woman to tree, Linder intercuts images such that they shift from appropriated pornographic photographs to imagery taken from catalogs on Roman sculpture. One work depicts Myrrha's grandfather Pygmalion, who fell in love with a sculpture of a female form that eventually came to life when Venus granted his prayer. Another photomontage, “He is already mine” (2022), depicts Myrrha's son Adonis, conceived with her father. 

 The photomontage grouping containing “A Dream Between Sleeping and Waking” (2022) draws the viewer into the fantastic world of the Texas underground. Wielding Blackness, queerness, and a true talent across mediums—performance, music, and digital art being a few—the House of Kenzo and Rabit seek to dismantle oppressive systems in Texas and beyond. Collaborating on work for this exhibition as well as the most recent issue of “Lampoon” magazine, Linder contrasts imagery of the collective and Rabit’s powerful presence with that of domestic objects to criticize mainstream representations of bodies and gender. This furthers the work that Linder has been making since the 1970s, using pop culture and the domiciliary to call attention to the narrow portrayals of womxn in the media. “Sex-Pol” continues in the garden gallery with two looping art films expanding on concepts in Linder’s photomontage series with Rabit and the House of Kenzo. The first is Linder’s “A dream between waking and sleeping” (2022), commissioned by The Charleston Trust, home of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, soundtrack by Maxwell Sterling. The second, “Angelica / Safe” (2022), features a soundtrack by Maxwell Sterling and Rabit; it is Rabit’s collaboration with Denver Bastion and Chicago-based performance art collective Suspended Culture. 

 Alongside the exhibition, Linder will release two limited edition giclée prints, with all proceeds donated to The Afiya Center (TAC) in Dallas, Texas. The only reproductive justice organization in North Texas founded and directed by Black womxn, TAC works to ensure all Black birthing folx have the right to parent or not parent and to choose, when, where, and how they want to birth. One of these prints is a collaborative work by Linder, BREXXITT, and Rabit. 

 Linder’s (b. 1954, Liverpool, UK) work has been exhibited widely, including by way of two traveling retrospectives: “Linderism” at Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK (2020); and “Femme/objet” at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France and Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, Germany (2013). Solo exhibitions include Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UK (2018); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2018); Art On The Underground, London, UK (2018); Glasgow Women's Library, Glasgow, Scotland (2018); Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA (2013); Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, UK (2013); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2007); and MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2007). In 2021, Linder’s work was presented in the Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK. Her work has been documented in five dedicated monographs. 

Blum & Poe is pleased to present Asuka Anastacia Ogawa’s third solo presentation with the gallery. 

 In this selection of new work, Ogawa explores her interests in the art of ikebana and the slow movement of flowers as they reach toward the sun. Having pondered these phenomena thoroughly, Ogawa plays with the underlying principles in a manner that both expands on and complements her signature figurative style. In the loose narratives behind its vignettes, this exhibition emphasizes concepts that have been garnered through Ogawa’s recent studies: an appreciation for beauty in the natural world, the use of elements of nature as conduits for prayer, and the jubilation that comes from working without haste.  

The origins of ikebana are thought to reach back to the sixth century, when Buddhism was introduced to Japan from China and Korea, and floral offerings to Buddha, known as kuge, were placed on temple altars. This custom was informed by the animistic polytheism at the root of Japanese Shinto culture. Echoing the sentiments of this practice, Ogawa’s subjects are depicted in the midst of acts of devotion or grounding, daily rituals that revolve around organic artifacts such as garlic cloves, cut or rooted flowers, and eggs.  

“Agosto” (2022) finds its subject in a placid state of prayer or reflection. Depicted against a sage backdrop, the figure is aided by a candle and the multiple garlic cloves that dangle from the brim of their hat. In “Hi, flower” (2022), one of the artist’s androgynous figures cranes over a technicolor bloom as their face, backed by the night sky, is reflected in the flower—a reflection directed at both the subject and the viewer of this work. Ogawa describes this composition as a meditation on the self—an inquiry into how the subject and the viewer, as corecipients of the reflection, might perceive themselves as coexisting with or going against the natural state of things—and a surreal communion between flower and individual, as they gaze upon each other in equal parts.  

Beyond an anecdotal interest in the philosophies of ikebana and the leisurely disposition of flowers, Ogawa has taken to heart the knowledge that supports these pursuits—using it, beyond her subject matter, in the way that she approaches art making. “It’s helped me to understand more of my practice,” she says. 

 Ogawa was born in Tokyo, Japan where she spent much of her childhood. When she was three years old, Ogawa moved from this vertical urban backdrop to rural Brazil, where she passed a handful of formative early years amongst wandering farm animals and rushing waterfalls. The artist later relocated to Sweden when she was a teen, where she attended high school, and soon thereafter she moved to London to pursue her BFA from Central Saint Martins. After having her first solo show at Henry Taylor’s studio in Los Angeles, CA in 2017, she had a solo show at Blum & Poe, Tokyo in 2020 and at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles in 2021. Her work is in the collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, and X Museum, Beijing, China. She is currently based in New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present “When the Sun Loses Its Light,” with work by Michelle Blade, Ian Collings, Shanique Emelife, Claudia Keep, Lauren Satlowski, and Joey Terrill. 

 “Christmas 1980. I was back from college. It’s me and my brother Greg. Or Gregory to everyone else. I was playing “River” on the piano, and we were doing our best Joni. Warbling through the high notes neither of us could come close to hitting. Laughing. There’s a polaroid around here somewhere I remember that Ma took. Found it! Here it is. Loved that night. Has always stayed with me.  

I’m gonna get to the point here—some months ago, an eighty-seven-year-old Canadian man was hospitalized after a bad fall. While undergoing a test to check the electrical activity in his brain, he suffered a heart attack. Because the man had a do-not-resuscitate order, the doctors let him pass away as the EEG recorded his thoughts. And what his brain activity scientifically showed is something that has been conjecture forever: our life does flash before us when we die. In the minute before and after his body died, the EEG scan read that he fell into a dream state that revealed his brain replaying memories from the span of his life.  I’m taking the hopeful position that these intimate scenes floating through at the end are the gentle ones, the calm ones—the ones that, at the time, are seemingly small but get dropped and locked in that emotional vault right there in our chests, then travel up and forever get held tight. 

 With that in mind, here's a few moments, taken and made real for us. Some delicate paintings on wood riffing off photos that Claudia shot on her phone while wandering or just being. Shanique’s family, friends, and herself from those snapshots that we hold dear. Michelle’s daughters lovingly rendered almost like a secret whisper and reminder of what is, now was. Lauren catching the last lights of an LA day, radiant and abstract. Ian, anchoring the truth that we have this vessel that keeps it all inside, ours alone really, and that’s OK. And Joey, sweet Joey, who has seen so much loss, yet giving us that seemingly flippant second that might go in a blink but actually never leaves. 

 For all of us, those touches are here if we are present and have held them, and now let them come back. They are alive, just like the work as witness that you are seeing, hopefully feeling. We all need to keep these moments wherever we keep them, or we really have nothing. Although it can be difficult, we can carry them and bring them back when we want. It’s ok even if it’s difficult because it’s the most important thing we have, here, now, in us. 

 When Greg passed, he was in his bed tucked in and smiling. I'm hoping he had just been in his bedroom at fourteen on a rainy February night, candles, ‘Tapestry’ on the record player and Hilary braiding his long brown hair; then Mt. Baldy on a summer morning with the sun tossing off kaleidoscopic rays through the trees; Lance on Fire Island on the beach in the late afternoon reading him passages from ‘Lolita’; Thanksgiving 1974 in the wood paneled dining room on Weyburn, the last time we were all there together... “

 —Jeff Poe

Blum & Poe is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Ha Chong-hyun. This is Ha’s fourth solo show with the gallery, and his second solo presentation in Los Angeles.  

This exhibition takes a retrospective look at Ha Chong-hyun’s pioneering practice and is the first to present “Conjunction 20-200” (2020), a monumental installation of eight towering canvases—each of which Ha painted with one of the signature techniques that he developed during the past five decades. The compositions in this massive polyptych are placed in dialogue with thirteen paintings dating from 1972 to 2021. 

 “Conjunction 20-200” stands atop rolls of raw hemp that unfurl onto the floor, interwoven with barbed wire. For Ha, this arrangement evokes the earth and refers to his earliest series of multimedia works, made between 1969 and 1973 when he was a member of the artist collective AG (Avant-Garde Association). During this period, he created site-specific installations out of atypical materials—including plaster, timber, newspaper, and, most notably, a series of burlap supports embedded with barbed wire. Both materials were at once mundane yet politically charged features of the urban landscape in the aftermath of the Korean War (1950–53): burlap sacks were used to transport food aid from the United States, while barbed wire fences ring the country’s military bases and divide the Korean peninsula to this day. Ha’s appropriation of these materials broke with the two-dimensional conventions of painting while evoking the authoritarian atmosphere of the postwar era.  

In 1974, Ha began his ongoing Conjunction series, which explores the material fusion of paint and canvas through his original bae-ap-bub (back-pressure) method, in which he presses viscous oil paint through the reverse of the coarsely woven cloth so it permeates the fabric and protrudes through the surface. Thereafter he variously brushes, smears, scrapes, and even scorches the paint in pursuit of an abstract composition that exposes the essence of its component materials. This experimental approach to painting as method rather than representation situated Ha as part of a movement that later came to be known as Dansaekhwa, which included peers such as Chung Sang-hwa, Kwon Young-woo, Lee Ufan, Park Seobo, and Yun Hyong-keun. Working in a reductionist aesthetic, these artists variously pushed paint, soaked canvas, dragged pencils, ripped paper, and otherwise manipulated materials in ways that transgressed the distinctions separating ink painting from oil, painting from sculpture, and object from viewer. Six decades on, Ha continues to find new ways to expand the vernacular of his Conjunction paintings.  

This solo exhibition at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles follows a retrospective at Palazzetto Tito (Istituzione Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa), a Collateral Event of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Sunjung Kim, Artistic Director of Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea. 

 Ha Chong-hyun was born in Sancheong, South Korea in 1935, and currently lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in South Korea, including a retrospective at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, South Korea (2012) and at the Gyeongnam Art Museum, Changwon, South Korea (2004). His work has also been featured in numerous landmark surveys, most recently: “Korean Abstract Art: Kim Whanki and Dansaekhwa,” Powerlong Museum, Shanghai, China (2018–19); “Rhythm in Monochrome: Korean Abstract Painting” at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2017); “When Process Becomes Form: Dansaekhwa and Korean Abstraction,” Villa Empain – Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, Belgium (2016); and “Dansaekhwa,” Palazzo Contarini Polignac, Venice, Italy (2015). Previously, Ha was featured in the survey “From All Sides: Tansaekhwa on Abstraction,” held at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA in 2014 and curated by Joan Kee, Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Michigan. Subsequently, he was included in Blum & Poe’s “Dansaekhwa and Minimalism,” which traveled from Los Angeles to New York in 2016—the first exhibition to compare and contrast Korean monochromatic painting with American Minimalism.  

His paintings are in the collections of leading institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Fukuoka Art Museum, Fukouka, Japan; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; M+, Hong Kong, China; Miyagi Museum of Art, Sendai, Japan; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, South Korea; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present new paintings by Yukie Ishikawa. This is Ishikawa’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first solo show in the United States. 

 This exhibition focuses on new works from the ongoing Impermanence series. Ishikawa began making these highly intricate abstractions in 2012, as she contemplated the ever-shifting appearance of the landscape outside her studio in Hidaka City, north of Tokyo, as well as the transience of her own existence within it. Searching for a means to render the ephemerality of nature in an abstract painterly language, she began to rework earlier canvases that had once seemed complete by adding new layers of lines and grids, some with sand mixed into the paint. Now responding to the given conditions of an existing painted surface rather than a blank canvas, Ishikawa seeks to generate a new pictorial meaning in which the lower palimpsest layer interacts with the form, color, and texture of the superimposed layers.  

Ishikawa’s practice is distinct for its deconstruction of Modernist abstraction and the monochromatic, frontal, and vertical-horizontal grids found in Minimalist art by drawing on compositions and techniques found in historical Japanese painting. The artist uses irregular groupings of curved and diagonal lines—reminiscent of the skewed perspectives seen in ancient Japanese scroll paintings—as well as dense optical color mixing to disrupt the viewer’s gaze and prevent it settling on a single point, grid, or layer. Some of the paintings are studded with dense clusters of thickly textured dots, which Ishikawa describes as a contemporary interpretation of the tentai method. Translating literally as “spot and substance,” tentai is an ink-painting technique that dates back to 9th-century China in which trees, rocks, and mountains are depicted through the application of pointillist ink dots, creating a hazy sense of vitality and rhythm. 

 Previously, Ishikawa was featured in the two-part survey “Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s,” held at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles in 2019 and curated by Mika Yoshitake. This exhibition featured paintings made at the beginning of her career, in the context of the Japanese New Painting movement, which developed alongside American and European Neo-Expressionism. During this period, her compositions were based on photographs and advertisements found in magazines and newspapers, which she enlarged, projected, and traced onto the canvas. Deliberately composing and coloring the abstractions in order to obfuscate the identity of the original subject matter, she aimed to create “a pictorial space outside of the three-dimensional space to which those things belonged.” 

 Yukie Ishikawa was born in Tokyo in 1961 and graduated from the Department of Oil Painting at Musashino Art University, Tokyo in 1983. She currently lives and works near Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture. Since the late 1980s she has held regular solo exhibitions in Japan and her paintings have been featured in prominent group exhibitions, including “The Vision of Contemporary Art,” Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, Japan (1995 and 1999); “Remaking Modernism in Japan 1900–2000,” University Art Museum, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2004); “The Power of Painting—Japanese Painting since 1980,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2005); “Primary Field: The State of Contemporary Art—Conversation with the 7 Fields,” Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, Japan (2007); “Minimal/ Post Minimal—The Contemporary Japanese Art from 1970s,” Utsunomiya Museum of Art, Utsunomiya, Japan (2013). Her work is represented in the collections of the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan; Iwaki City Art Museum, Iwaki, Japan; Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, Japan; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; National Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan; Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Karuizawa, Japan; and the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, Utsunomiya, Japan. 

Blum & Poe is pleased to present “Three Landscapes,” the first in a series of exhibitions curated by Ruthanna Hopper and Mariah Nielson intended to share the history and profound impact of the Marin County, CA creative community from the 1950s to today. The series begins with the story of Anna, Lawrence, and JB—a dancer, a landscape architect, and a sculptor—each a pioneer of their respective disciplines. Deeply engaged with each other’s practices during the 1960s and ‘70s, these three innovators sourced “spiritual and ecological sustenance” from Marin County, culling endless inspiration from the natural landscape and incorporating its raw materials into their work. 
 
 This exhibition presents key historical works created by JB Blunk in the 1960s and ‘70s. Made specifically for the Halprins’ home, these pieces have never before been displayed to the public. True to JB’s tradition, these sculptures were carved from salvaged old growth redwood burl and cypress—the artist worked with stumps often centuries old and larger than twenty feet in diameter. Known for using chainsaws and hand tools on massive, single blocks of wood, JB would study the grain and burl for days or weeks, and then—without the use of sketches or maquettes—he would work reductively on the single form. Seeking to reveal the spirit of the organic materials with which he worked, JB often left much of the natural form intact, celebrating its inherent qualities. His works were made to be used, with form and function almost indistinct. As artist Charles Ray once put it, “If you can’t see a work of JB Blunk’s, you can sit on it. Perhaps you see it by sitting on it.” 
 
 These immaculate sculptures that are also furniture—a throne, a bench, tables, and a stool—were participatory witnesses to the Halprins’ homelife during an exceedingly fertile period. The Halprins were regularly photographed on and around the seating installation and considered the sculptures to be integral parts of their interior landscape. Anna once said, “These pieces are primary figures in our home.”  “Three Landscapes” teases out this intimate relationship between Blunk and the Halprins and between the creative works and credos they cultivated together during this period. Installed alongside JB’s wooden works are streaming archival footage of two of Anna Halprin’s seminal dances and Lawrence Halprin’s abstract paintings from 1960–61. Presented in three discrete spaces across the gallery campus, the viewer is guided by a dance score created for this project in tribute to Anna’s choreography and the scores Lawrence would sketch and print for her. 
 
In 1965, Anna’s “Parades and Changes” shook the dance world by challenging conceptions of nudity, stillness, and the “ceremony of trust” (as she named it) between performers and audience. On view in the gallery, “Paper Dance” is a section from this piece in which dancers slowly, ritualistically take off their clothes while focusing on a spot far away. With “Paper Dance,” the dancers, now nude, rip up sheets of brown paper and toss them overhead. The work reveals how ordinary tasks such as dressing and undressing can become a dance when they are done with awareness by the performer. When the piece premiered in Sweden in 1965, this revolutionary use of nudity onstage was revered, but two years later, in New York City, it led to a warrant for Anna’s arrest. This piece, like so many of Anna’s works, is also concerned with the form of the human body and how our gestures, whether subtle or extreme, can create a landscape of movement. 
 
 During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Lawrence and Anna developed various methods of generating collective creativity. They led a series of workshops called “Experiments in the Environment,” bringing dancers, architects, and other artists together to explore group creativity in relation to awareness of the environment, in both rural and urban settings. Increasingly, Anna’s performances moved out of the theater and into the community, helping people address social and emotional concerns. 
 
“Ceremony of Us” (1969) was created in response to Los Angeles’s 1965 Watts Uprising. Anna was invited to work with Studio Watts on a performance for a festival at the Mark Taper Forum. She saw this as an opportunity to explore race relations through dance. For five months she worked separately with an all-Black group in Watts and an all-white group in San Francisco, using the same scores. Then, for ten days, she brought the two groups together to develop the performance. “During those days, working and living together,” Anna later said, “they collectively created their performance around the experience of becoming one group. My role was to see what the group was most ready for and what materials turned them on, then to guide them in choreographing their own responses.” She then formed the first multiracial dance company in the US and thereafter increasingly focused on social justice themes in her work. 
 
 Lawrence documented Anna’s dancing widely in his prolific drawing practice, dating back to early costume designs he made for her in the 1940s, and avidly sketched her workshops and performances throughout his life. He developed scoring as a way to communicate movement through the environment which came out of his investigations of her dances and as a language for a collaborative creative process. Their practices were a total cross-pollination. Anna once put it, “As Larry inspired me with his sensitivity to the environment, which influenced my experiments, I influenced him in my use of movement audience participation as I pioneered new forms in dance.” 
 
 The abstract paintings on paper by Lawrence presented here, like Anna’s output from these years, appear to derive from a very personal, experimental, and psychological space. Those who were closest to him at the time of their execution knew little or nothing about their existence. In placing these experimental works contextually into both Lawrence’s life and the history of modern art, a strong connection can be made to his introduction to Jungian psychology and postwar American Abstract Expressionism in the second half of the 1950s. Joseph Henderson, Lawrence’s analyst, wrote on the psychology of experience and linear design in the landscape architect’s built spaces: “The linear design…always moves beyond any fixed points in the search for new and different levels of experience…for me his designs seem to depend on the creation of a moving line as an ordering principle by which people can experience nature archetypically.” This delving inward, analyzing the personal and psychic experience, was as much fieldwork for Lawrence as the lessons he derived from academia or the knowledge he took in from communing with the natural environment. By understanding the human psyche on a micro level, we understand humanity and nature on a macro level: the collective unconscious and the inherited mythologies and archetypes that frame our everyday experiences. 
 
JB, too, worked with a Jungian analyst in the 1960s and credits his introspection into dreams as a guiding principle for his practice and form-making. Like Anna and Lawrence, JB attempted to extract and distill archetypal forms from his raw materials, thereby creating new landscapes of perception. Whether in a public space or the home, raising a family or interacting with communities, confronting societal oppressions or healing the body from disease, this approach to living creativity holistically was paramount to JB, Anna, and Lawrence. Although manifested distinctly within these three disparate practices, by no coincidence were these shared tenets born amongst the same lush ecology of Marin County. 
 
 JB Blunk (b. 1926, Ottawa, KS; d. 2002, Inverness, CA) was born in Kansas and eventually settled in the town of Inverness, CA. He studied ceramics at UCLA with Laura Andresen in the 1940s and was drafted into the Korean War in 1950. While stationed in Japan he met the artist Isamu Noguchi who helped arrange two apprenticeships for Blunk with master potters Rosanjin Kitaōji and Toyo Kaneshige. Blunk lived and worked in Japan for three years, thoroughly steeping himself in the culture. In 1954 he returned to California and eventually settled in Inverness, where he created his masterpiece: a hand-built home for his family assembled from salvaged materials. In the early 1960s he began working with wood, first carving simple pieces of furniture and eventually producing large-scale public installations. Blunk’s practice included painting, jewelry, ceramics, furniture, and sculpture. It can be difficult to tell where Blunk’s interventions into wood, clay, and stone begin and end. In this respect he was very much like his friend and mentor Noguchi, who said that he sought in his raw material “not what can be imposed but something closer to its being. Beneath the skin is the brilliance of matter.” 
 
 Anna Halprin (b. 1920, Winnetka, IL; d. 2021, Kentfield, CA) was born into a Jewish family and was exposed to dance from a very early age via her grandfather's involvement in religious dancing. By the age of fifteen, Halprin began studying the techniques of Ruth St. Denis and Isadora Duncan. She later pursued her studies at the University of Wisconsin, where she met and soon after married Lawrence. After World War II, the couple settled in San Francisco, a move that reoriented Halprin away from the tight modernist circles of her former home, New York City, and towards different modalities. In 1955, Halprin founded the groundbreaking San Francisco Dancers' Workshop, where her students included Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk. She collaborated there with composers John Cage, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young, among other creative forces. Halprin created more than 150 dance pieces and wrote three books in her 100 years, pioneering the experimental art form known as postmodern dance. She defied traditional notions of dance, extending its boundaries to address social issues, build community, foster both physical and emotional healing, and connect people to nature. When she was diagnosed with cancer in the early 1970s, she used dance as part of her healing process and subsequently created innovative dance programs for cancer and AIDS patients. In 1978, Halprin started the Tamalpa Institute with her daughter Daria, featuring movement-based arts therapy, which remains active in Marin County. 
 
 Lawrence Halprin (b. 1916, Brooklyn, NY; d. 2009, Kentfield, CA) was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. After time spent in Israel and at Cornell University, Halprin pursued a Master of Science in horticulture in 1941 at the University of Wisconsin. After his marriage to Anna, he entered the Bachelor of Landscape Architecture program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1942. Halprin’s career as a landscape architect was delayed by two years as he, like many of his peers, enlisted in the US Navy during World War II. In the spring of 1945, he returned to California and opened his own firm in San Francisco. By the mid-1960s, Lawrence Halprin and Associates gained recognition for their urban landscape redevelopment projects and continued to receive major commissions for another three decades. Halprin was awarded numerous honors such as the American Institute of Architects Medal for Allied Professions (1964), the Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects ASLA Design Medal (2003), the Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1978), the University of Virginia Thomas Jefferson Medal in Architecture (1979), and the National Medal of Arts (2002), the nation’s highest artistic honor. Halprin published several books including “RSVP Cycles,” “Taking Part,” “Cities,” “Freeways,” and “Notebooks.” 

“Steve Reich: Since that time, things have changed. And there are no more record stores.  
Russell Hartenberger: In other parts of the world, there still are record stores…” 
 
—Excerpt from Steve Reich's “Conversations” (New York: Hanover Square Press, 2022) 
 
Blum & Poe is pleased to present “Sunset, Sunrise (repeat) b/w The Record Pavilion,” Los Angeles-based artist Dave Muller’s eleventh solo exhibition with the gallery. 
 
 With “Sunset, Sunrise (repeat) b/w The Record Pavilion,” Muller looks back on his life of growing up in record stores. In a tribute to the slow and physical act of touching, browsing, and looking at records, this exhibition presents the artist’s treasured pastime, one that is becoming extinct as music consumption is increasingly intangible. The presentation unfolds in three parts: hand-painted wall murals, new paintings of records and record store paraphernalia, and an open-air, modernist pavilion for rehousing records. 
 
 Muller’s newest paintings draw from a reservoir of reference materials that the artist has amassed, including his scrupulous archive of price tags and hype stickers—a personal collection of roughly 1,500 unique decals from albums purchased. Depicting these at larger-than-life scale and layering them atop one another to fill the composition, Muller tapes off, gessoes, and paints each section of the work’s surface in thin, accumulating layers, in a nod to the analog and hand-done systems of music distribution. 
 
 Muller also presents works that further his quintessential record paintings. Inspiring the exhibition’s title, Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell” and Amii Stewart’s “Knock on Wood,” two disco-era classics, both have sunsets (or perhaps, sunrises) pictured on their labels. Muller has adoringly rendered both labels, every detail and bit of wear and tear, in his paintings—turning the gallery into a durational space, with a sunrise at the east end and a sunset in the west. With these artworks as bookends, this installation functions as a three-dimensional, twenty-four-hour clock face. 
 
At the center of the clock that makes up “Sunset, Sunrise (repeat) b/w The Record Pavilion” is the record pavilion: an open structure filled with a cornucopia of records from his personal collection that spans eras, countries, categories, and genres—like a diary that traces a life lived in music. The artist sees the records in this space as components of the ongoing self-portrait that is his greater collection: a self-portrait that is also an invitation to peruse. Of the records that he is willing to part with, he says, “they already had their journey with me.” Muller will be personally selling records, manning the register, and hosting in-store sets and chats in the pavilion on Saturday, July 30 from 10am to 6pm. 
 
 Dave Muller lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León, Spain; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MI. His work is represented in the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present Atlanta-based artist Lonnie Holley’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first in Los Angeles.  

Holley’s life and work read as a narrative retelling of Black American history—the residual effects of the Jim Crow era, the triumphs of the Civil Rights movement, and the struggles with false narratives around class mobility and race. Holley’s multidisciplinary practice seeks to educate viewers as a means of remedying the historical amnesia surrounding these topics. Rooting himself in the events of the past, the artist moves into the future—presenting synesthetic, multimedia work that visually engages its viewers with unique found objects and intricate motifs to subsequently inform on topics such as inequity and history as memory.  

Now a key figure within the Afro-Atlantic artistic movement, Holley began making sculptural work in 1979. The artist’s initial foray into this practice was driven by a desire to memorialize loved ones who had passed—with his family unable to afford commercially engraved stones, Holley created gravestones from castoff slabs of industrial sand for two of his sister’s children. The sculptures presented here extend from this interest in memorialization, as Holley identifies and deploys stories from his life, from the lives of his ancestors, and from the Civil Rights movement. Continuing to use his signature found materials—a practice that the artist views as giving worth to that which has been cast aside, much like Black Americans under Jim Crow—Holley builds his recent sculptures from discarded objects such as wire, electric cables, beads, denim, holiday decorations, and an American flag. 

 A key motif in Holley’s oeuvre is that of the profile: it has appeared in his sculptures for roughly four decades and proliferates in the paintings presented here. While these configurations clearly depict a human form, the figures never quite solidify. In the case of the sculptures, these faces are formed from wires and are hollow in the center; in the paintings, they are partially translucent, created with thin layers of spray paint. This state of incompleteness alludes to themes of erasure and self-assertion that Holley has tackled in his own life: fighting for a place within his own family after a difficult childhood enduring foster homes and forced labor, finding a vocation after working many different jobs to make ends meet, and, finally, carving out a place for himself in the traditionally exclusive, Eurocentric canon of art history.  

The paintings Holley presents here are not merely figurative; they layer this facial profile motif to create a series of paintings that is simultaneously atmospheric and narrative, figurative and abstract. When following the curved lines of Holley’s patterns, the viewer’s eye is drawn to the negative space between forms. Sometimes executed on canvas and other times on quilts, these many faces quickly become disassociated markings that, when taken in unison, create a swirling, nonlinear grid—unbound by the rigidity of the grids used by the likes of Renaissance painters to trick the eye and create depth from flatness. Holley’s figurative abstractions flow en masse and interweave to convey their message via their multitudes: layers of spray paint create compositions that compete in equal parts for the viewer’s attention while triumphantly retaining their flatness to draw the eye into every bit of the painting at once. Holley uses the quilt as a picture plane to pay homage to women’s work and to harness the charged aura of Black American ancestral history and culture. Often discarded or dismissed by mainstream society as handicraft, quilts here become sacred grounds upon which the artist further explores some of the tropes of his signature visual language. These works are metaphors for the multitudinous narratives of history—each new layer building upon, or muting, the one before it to create the finished product.  

Holley uses his platform to create visually stunning objects that compassionately educate their audience on the Black struggle for equality in the United States and its nuances. Formally, the artist’s work has acquired a keen density over his long career. These compositions become increasingly loaded with historical and narrative value as the artist acquires ever more experience. As Holley once described it, “This is memory. Everything is memory. Every face in these paintings.” 

 Lonnie Holley (b. Birmingham, AL, 1950) lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; among many others. Holley’s work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions including at Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX (2022); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY (2021); Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA (2017); Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC (2015); Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL (2004), and many more. Holley has been the subject of several documentary films, and his own directed short film “I Snuck off the Slave Ship” premiered at Sundance in 2018.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present “Excavation,” canonical artist Lynda Benglis’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. One might think of excavation as a form of most laborious searching. To be successful within this pursuit, the seeker must not merely arrive at their desired end but must also remove or strip back what has previously existed, displacing or repurposing the original material in order to create a wholly new outcome. Now imagine that the search in question concerns the extraction of a new, cohesive narrative from a lifetime of philosophical and tangible output. To excavate such an entity would be a formidable and impressive task indeed.  In the case of this exhibition, “Excavation” alludes to the present themes in a twofold manner. Firstly, it mines Benglis’s celebrated past to make new history by furthering the artist’s explorations of the gestural and the form of the knot. Secondly, this presentation materializes through the exchange of negative and positive space—a process that is also undertaken in digging or displacing earth—through the act of cast-making, wherein one creates nothing from something and then something from nothing again. Swirling, spiraling, rising, and cascading, the sculptures that comprise “Excavation” nod to a form that Benglis has used to much acclaim and scrutiny throughout the course of her career: the gesture of the knot. “Village Voice” critic John Perreault famously decried Benglis’s original sparkle knot sculptures, created between 1972 and 1974, as “too garish to be pretty and too beautiful to be vulgar.” The sculptures in “Excavation,” these almost knots, thumb their noses at this comment. Woven less tightly than their predecessors, these works, which curl and intersect yet never truly bind, create a burning anticipation that doesn’t quite resolve itself. Benglis has connected her interest in knots to time spent crocheting with her grandmother, thus situating her use of this form in a long lineage of craft and women’s work. If the knots presented in “Excavation” were to be used in traditional craft, however, they would be unable to fulfill their intended functions. Their constructions are too weak, their ends too untethered, to be mistaken for the beautiful yet utilitarian objects of craftswomen past. These sculptures, while alluding to craft, perform it rather poorly—and yet, they declare this fact proudly for all to see. “Power Tower” (2019) commands attention with its seven-and-a-half-foot height and flashy material composition of White Tombasil bronze. If it is “too garish to be pretty,” then it is because this piece is meant, as the title asserts, to hold power in its physicality, though its origins are quite humble. The ceramics presented here, or “Elephant Necklaces” as the artist refers to them, are the works from which the larger sculptures in the exhibition take their forms. The contrast between hardy cast bronze and fragile ceramic presented in “Excavation” points to a moment of transition between scale, materials, texture, mass, and coloration. Gender, class connotations, and an overarching cultural tendency to struggle with pluralism subtend these aesthetic qualities, pitting hard against soft, delicate against strong, showy against restrained, and excess against moderation. The observation of these contrasts serves to make the viewer aware that such qualities exist to a greater or lesser degree in all the objects present in the exhibition. They exist also in the viewers themselves, made visible in the reflective surfaces of the bronzes. Through the lens of the sheeny exteriors of “Excavation,” dichotomies unite to become spectrums. One through line in Benglis’s long career is a consistent inquiry into surface aesthetics. In “Excavation,” smooth, reflective surfaces force viewers to gaze at themselves and others, while the finish of an object, with color or materiality determining its perceived worth, is evocative of socioeconomic divides. This series sees Benglis returning to an exploration of surface, as begun in her early knots. From 1972 to 1974, these forms were covered in glitter and later—in a separate body of work, created from 1973 to 1976—sprayed with a metallic layer of aluminum, copper, or tin. The bronze casting process is a logical step in the material trajectory of Benglis’s oeuvre, but the origins of these pieces are more pleasurable than the average bronze. They are rooted in—and emphasize—the decorative as opposed to the austere. A core tenet of the Pattern and Decoration movement, with which Benglis has been occasionally associated, is that art should be undertaken for enjoyment; flourishes and finishes should be indulged in and flamboyance is paramount.  To unite joy and power under the umbrella of that which refuses to be categorized is to create something novel at a time when, despite the fact that Benglis has been gesturing toward these problems for a half-century, societies of the world are still in the process of rectifying the inequities that they have allowed to proliferate—gender inequality, lack of class mobility, and a rigid sense of gender binaries. As these divides persist, Benglis continues to hone her practice: mining her oeuvre for the most effective tropes and physicalizing them through new and expansive material processes. The result is neither pretty nor garish, beautiful nor vulgar—it is the sum of these qualities at their best. Lynda Benglis (b. 1941, Lake Charles, LA) lives and works in New York, NY; Santa Fe, NM; Kastellorizo, Greece; and Ahmedabad, India. Benglis’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at major museums around the world, including the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX (2022); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2021); Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Greece (2019); Kistefos-Museet, Jevnaker, Norway (2018); Museo Internacional del Barroco, Puebla, Mexico (2016); Bergen Assembly, KODE Art Museums of Bergen, Norway (2016); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2016); Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK (2015); and Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY (2015).  Benglis is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Her work is held in numerous public collections including Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Tate Modern, London, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Blum & Poe is pleased to announce the representation of Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Quin on the occasion of her first solo exhibition with the gallery, “Pulse Train Howl.” This show will precede her first museum solo exhibition which will open later this year at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS, along with a presentation at Pond Society, Shanghai, China. Co-published with Colpa Press, NMOCA will also be producing the first monograph on Quin’s practice, spanning several bodies of work to date. Quin is also represented by Friends Indeed Gallery, San Francisco, CA.  “Rendered in a variety of techniques, Lauren Quin’s throbbing reverberations of symbols steam ahead before reaching a state of fever-pitch where visual intensities correlate to guttural wailing. Suggesting a synesthesia between sight and sound, ocular shivers within vibrant layers recall sonic vibrations. Pathways multiply and quicken before culminating in a kaleidoscopic overwhelm of optical howling. Strained, noisy, and fried, formations of partial segments act as snaps of communication, frozen in their process of forging a coherent whole. Reflecting Quin’s zealously layered canvases, the exhibition’s title draws from patterns of electrical spikes in the nervous system as well as a wolfpack’s long-range communication, evoking the artist’s rhythmic—almost sonic—synchronized symbols and combinations of mark making. 

Disparate though related source images—culled from both everyday life and art history—are adopted and repeated throughout the layers, responding differently with each iteration. As Quin describes, these forms “are not built with a plan, rather a radius of symbols I collect and return to over the years.” These symbols include bat wings, bone structures, spider legs, fingers, the mouth of the mummy, a Lee Lozano drawing of an oil can, a painting of a patinated crown by Oskar Schlemmer, and an ancient sculpture of a rowboat. The source forms are connected by their shared structural repetition, offering rings or appendages that spiral and curl inward like mangled paws. Repeated in acts of self-reference, the forms fuse into tentacles, tubes, and tunnels while moving outward in rippling moiré patterns. 

A pattern of iridescent scales serves as a base layer or underpainting. Revealed later through a process of removal, the partial tubes of color are also repeated closer to the paintings’ surfaces. These spirited prismatic flakes curl like fractured ribbons as they flicker with reflective luminosity. Close up, the minced curves float like soft clicks. From further away, they crystallize into a beating surge of tumultuous energy. Moments of blurred, spinning entropy guide the momentum of marks like a drain’s vortex. On top of and within the patterned layers, buoyant biomorphic masses in vivid, fleshy colors hover on top of and within the patterned layers. Dancing within the thresholds of liminal space and warping depth perception via variation of scale, the snaking tubes and tunnels imply no clear delineation between exteriors and interiors. 

Once the composition is established, the layers filling all possible negative space, Quin commences the time-sensitive process of wiping, carving, and etching her imagery into the surface to reveal contrasting colors underneath, repeating the imagery to a rippling effect. The traces in the wet paint range from the thickness of a finger to the thinness of a nimble etch mark—resulting in radiating waves that start with a quiver and climax in a throb. The final element of Quin’s ocular alphabet is introduced in luminous dispersed lines of various weights repeating aforementioned symbols. Through a monoprinting process, the source images are regenerated in crackling flairs of light. While the speckled ink acts as light bouncing off the volumetric tubes, delicate and sparkling cross-hatching provides yet another avenue for depth-building. 

As certain layers can only be executed within windows of drying time, the paintings inherit an immediate and urgent physicality. After establishing a painting’s foundation in this time-sensitive process of cumulative and retractive mark-making, Quin develops each painting’s individual sensibility on its own terms. Conversing within the layers of scaled patterns, morphing limb-like forms, carved drawings, and sizzling lines, the techniques are repeated, tempered, and pulled forward, following each unique rhythm to completion. Regulating layers to the pace of each work, forms are brought to the forefront—mining ever greater depths and rendering pattern as both a stable form and slippery void. 

Quin’s large-scale painting in the garden gallery is presented in homage to Lynda Benglis’s neighboring exhibition, ‘Excavation.’ The presentation acknowledges a shared sensibility of looping, knotted, reflective, and textured forms that speak directly to the visceral body. The turbulent force wielding Quin’s patterns, limbs, and colors consumes the field of vision, inviting the viewer to embody the work’s somatic feedback.”

—Marie Heilich  Lauren Quin lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Her work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including “Pulse Train Howl” (2022), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA, and group exhibitions, such as “Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection” (opening summer of 2022), Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and “On Boxing” (2021), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present Brooklyn and London-based artist Alvaro Barrington's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. "91–98 jfk–lax border This exhibition is my thank-you to some of my heroes. When the bro Chadwick Boseman died, so many of us felt a huge pain and deep loss. People cried because a fictional king had died. It made me think of how I can’t even imagine the pain a generation must have felt when a real king—Dr. King, Malcolm, and the Panthers—got taken from us. A community that really needed love and support saw Reaganomics and new Jim Crows, along with other new systems of hate, take hold. For many in that generation, the reasonable option to self-medicate through disco and cocaine turned into the crack epidemic, and needle sharing exasperated the new HIV virus. A generation who saw the pain in the eyes and the souls of their mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, and neighbors began to reimagine how to address these issues when the larger structural solution was locking us up. In L.A., Dr. Dre and Snoop made the less dangerous chronic cool. They told us to put on jimmy hats, and—10 million records later—my generation started smoking up and wrapping up. Snoop, Dre, and the chronic saved a generation. In N.Y.C., they said Giuliani cleaned up the city, which is wild because every kid I know knew we needed to change this generational curse. We started smoking up, and they came and locked everyone up. Humans need a sense of self-worth and a sense of dignity. A generation returned from jail with wild scars: people saw their family members gunned down in front them; Latasha Harlins was murdered; and 90 percent of women are sexually assaulted before they get locked up. In some prisons, one half of the men have been sexually assaulted—trauma on trauma, put in a box. When these folks came out, Biggie, JAY-Z, and Lil’ Kim gave us the commandments to get fly and carry our heads high. Pac told us to keep our heads up. When he was taken, DMX carried the torch to make us bark, pray, and cry. Mary J made us say we need real love. Ghostface took his darkest moment and made us use the newspaper—made us want to ground our souls and reach for the skies. Magazines and the press people, with only profits in their mind, claimed to love the culture; they made millions of dollars telling the West and East Coast that we were at war on the ground. The only real narrative was that we saved each other. L.A., thank you." – Alvaro Barrington Alvaro (cadet) Barrington (b. 1983, Caracas, Venezuela) Biography Figuring it out is hard and I’m sorry Everything I experience is real Sometimes the safest place I feel is sleeping on the streets Latasha Harlins It’s your job Consider the source Wish we grew up on the same advice Arbitrary geopolitical cousins fight political identity Embodied knowledge Practicing Trust For the CULTURE/ If you were them, You would be them/ LISTEN/ Play your part don’t let the position play you Emotional moron but he isn’t evil Them “ALL THAT I GOT IS YOU” days Hip-hop is not the problem our reality is the problem We shall overcome… We gonna be alright Fight the power Residue of racism Where there is lions there are vultures Cultural confidence They get accustomed to the sweet tooth The enslaved Shack poor We are all just walking each other home Concept Albums Whatever the fuck is whatever da fuck Ok, Sorry/ It’s my flesh that holds on to facts, It’s my spirit that holds on to truth/ She riding dick on her tippy toes/ Trauma looping/ The culture sometimes bigger than the charts The liquor store closer than the mosques People come in with the platform for their own questions more than to sit and listen The art lies in concealing the art Public squalor and private opulence Painting in the service of ideas Socializing risk/privatizing profits It was all a dream More conscious of the way we raise our daughters

Blum & Poe is pleased to present "EONS OF NEON NESCIENT PEONS POPCORN INFLUENCE AND SUCH," Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. This presentation shows Lewis further engaging with the medium of drawing in three distinct groupings. In the first grouping of work, Lewis uses the modern English alphabet as signifiers, employing his signature graphite to explore intuitive permutations within the written word. In the two other bodies of work presented here—both taking as their conceptual departure point the symbolic sign system of Gregg shorthand—Lewis further examines the liminal space between this repertoire of signifiers and the expressive nature of gestural abstraction. "Open" (2022), "Ppn ocor" (2022), and "Eon" (2022) are works created as variations on words lifted from journals, ruminations on ideas of race, that the artist kept while completing his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; back when he was brewing what could be considered the foundation of his visual practice’s interest in linguistics. Each word, appropriated from the artist’s prior self, is presented here as an anagram that has neither a distinctive entry nor exit point, though there is always a through line deceptively indicating how one might traverse the letters that they encounter. Eon, for instance, might be read as “one” or “eno” if the viewer were to follow its line in either direction. In Lewis’s pieces containing signs from Gregg shorthand, the artist is reprising and expanding upon some of the ciphers that originated in his alphabet-based pieces. "Peon" (2022) and "Neon" (2022), for instance, toy with the set of phonetics shared by "Open," "Ppn ocor," and "Eon"—reconfiguring the sound of each word and presenting it with a different set of signifiers. The shorthand works allow Lewis to further explore the formal qualities of the text. These shorthand signs, which Lewis inserts into his gestural graphite compositions, interlace both the structures of typeface and the intuitive elements of abstract expressionism: the architectural pairs with the corporeal, form collides with emotion, and everyday modes of imparting meaning are infused with the artist’s ability to channel the unfathomable. The third body of work presented here sees Lewis further leaning into the rhythmic, bodily qualities of language. In "Her" (2021), "Nescient" (2021), and "Influence" (2021) the artist begins with a gesture that responds to the sound of the word that makes up each title. The composition then continues to evolve as an innate response to its linguistic subject matter. Color and form support the title, serving its conceptual end and propping it up. "EONS OF NEON NESCIENT PEONS POPCORN INFLUENCE AND SUCH" advances Lewis’s parsing of the modes of communication that are inherent in the visual expression of language. His appropriated words become fodder for an endlessly evolving drawing practice, extending into shorthand drawings and abstraction and pushing the forms of communication into an ever more physical realm. The artist channels his instincts to whittle the methods of communication down to their finest minutiae—reaching an instinctual connection to the meaning of his chosen word or words that supersedes semiotics and generates a conduit to comprehension. Tony Lewis (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Chicago. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including "Anthology 2014–2016," Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2018); "Plunder," Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2017); "Alms, Comity and Plunder," Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy (2016); and "nomenclature movement free pressure power weight," Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH (2015). Lewis participated in the 2014 iteration of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY and was the recipient of the 2017–2018 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present "Los Angeles Portraits," a selection of drawings by Marc Richards. Organized by Jonas Wood, the works shown here depict well-known figures in the Los Angeles art scene prior to the global turning point of 2020. Taken as a whole, this collection of work presents a time capsule—the opportunity to revisit a moment of blossoming social art history in Southern California, blissfully frozen on a precipice. A catalog of the work in "Los Angeles Portraits" will launch in tandem with the exhibition. "A Portrait of the Collector as a Young Artist: Marc Richards’ Los Angeles Portraits Up the stairs behind an elegant storefront on La Brea in Los Angeles Marc Richards prepares for his first solo exhibition. Gallery debuts might happen every weekend, but rarely does an artist emerge after almost fifty years of trading and collecting art, and even more rarely at one of the most prominent contemporary art galleries, Blum & Poe, organized by established artist Jonas Wood. 'I’m 72 years old and I’ve never had a show, I’ve never thought of having a show. Never even dreamed of having a show.' Begun on a whim, against the wall in black frames lean almost fifty portraits of the dealers, artists, collectors, and impresarios that make up the Los Angeles art world in 2020, both a collection of characters and a time capsule. With a good tan behind a thin beard and a dapper driving cap, Richards leans back behind his desk to tell his story of how after a lifetime of trading art, he’s making his artistic debut. 'In 1972, I took a few months off to travel before attending law school. In Morocco, I found myself in awe of what I was seeing. I’d get high and I’d spend hours and hours looking at carpets and at craftsmen’s hands hammering copper and my aesthetic sensibilities woke up. I never made it to law school.' This nascent feeling set him into the business end of art—from antiquities to contemporary art and back again—and until recently that’s where his aesthetic sensibility stayed. The works that surround him in the gallery tell his tale too. An ancient Chinese statue and a ceremonial African mask stand on pedestals not far from a large photograph plucked from Google Street View by Canadian artist Jon Rafman and a painting still in its packing by Los Angeles’s Aaron Garber-Maikovska, brushstrokes peeking from behind translucent plastic. 'A couple years ago I started dabbling, mostly drawing psychedelic-like figures with pastels. Then one day, I started to think I’d do a realistic image. After drawing a couple of celebrities, I realized why not do the art world. After all, this is the community I’m in. I posted one on Instagram and I got this cool response from everyone.' Richards describes his pictures as residing somewhere between 'a portrait and a caricature, but mainly I want to convey the sincerity and respect I feel for my colleagues.' The art world to many outsiders is an insider’s game. One of the old myths about art is that of the lonely genius, but contemporary art has always been made within communities of support and often commerce. Behind every picture and sculpture, video and performance, stand hundreds of people from cohorts to curators, collectors and dealers, trying to midwife art into existence. And here alongside 49 portraits of LA artists such as Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Mark Grotjahn are all the diverse characters that make up a time and place, from dealers like iconic LA gallerist Shaun Caley Regen and François Ghebaly, to collector (and recent art fair founder) Dean Valentine alongside museum directors Ann Philbin and Michael Govan. Within many of the pictures, Richards has drawn objects that he associates with each subject: some absurd, some direct. Behind art dealer and hotelier Benjamin Trigano is a 'No Vacancy' sign, next to a 'Waiting List' for collectors trying to secure (one assumes) work of the more sought-after artists in the gallery. Collector and dealer Stefan Simchowitz, in the large-brimmed hat he often wears, looked to Richards 'like an avocado farmer,' so he appears with a couple of those green fruits floating above him. Woods beams from one of the pots made by his wife, artist Shio Kusaka, and Kusaka appears a few portraits later with basketballs from Jonas’ paintings bouncing behind her. Above gallerist Tim Blum, Richards has added a red sun, symbolic for him of Blum’s enduring support for Japanese artists. On the impetus for this exhibition Richards explains, 'Jonas has a real passion for what I’m doing—he says somehow without knowing it, I documented the art world in a moment in time. And he found that fascinating.' A time capsule of a moment as seen by one of the unlikely figures who stumbled into art and stuck around for a lifetime, the portrait series is wrought with a charm naive in its approach as it is sophisticated in its knowledge of how all these people fit into the cultural history of a place. The time that Richards has worked in the art world tracked with the rise of Los Angeles from a relative backwater to one of the global centers of contemporary art. That boom has attracted, shaped, and aided almost every single person he’s drawn. 'Though I’d like to do more, the problem is unfortunately I couldn’t do everybody,' he said shifting through the last of his framed portraits. 'But it wasn’t formulaic at all, I just started with the people I knew.'" – Andrew Berardini Marc Richards lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Richards has been involved in contemporary art for more than thirty years as both a dealer and collector. He is the producer and moderator of “Art Matters,” a series of panel discussions interviewing members of the Los Angeles art community.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present "Pigeon Sweat," the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist Eddie Martinez. This new suite of large-scale paintings captures Martinez’s mastery of revealing the representational through abstraction. He channels speed, impulse, and automatism in combination with tradition and art historical precedents, manifesting compositions that are simultaneously journalistic and autobiographical. With "Pigeon Sweat," Martinez records snippets of life as it happens—quotidian vignettes in which Raid cans aim at wasps, foliage crawls a loggia wall, and toys litter a toddler’s floor. Variously combining oil, enamel, and spray paint on canvas, Martinez also often layers unexpected materials from the studio in his collaged surfaces—perhaps a discarded baby wipe lending dimension to the wing of a butterfly painting. The exhibition’s eponymous artwork, "Pigeon Sweat" (2021), is a still life with vibrant blocks of color and expressive strokes. Against a strawberry-milkshake-pink background, cartoonish forms cluster together at the painting’s center with imagery that conjures loose associations and dreamlike meanderings. Sneakers, plant leaves, a clown’s profile? With color planes peeking out from layers of overpainting, these shapes serve as vehicles for surfing one’s own subconscious. The title itself is scrawled beneath as part of the composition, defining the painting architecturally. The painting "Loggia" (2021) belongs to Martinez’s ongoing Whiteout series—with densely packed landscapes and animated flora painted over in white, his rich signature hues washed over in white. The bulbous and biomorphic plant forms depict the loggia of the Los Angeles gallery’s garden and in this tonal range and state of partial-erasure appear pale, delicate, almost ghost-like. "All Space" (2021) exemplifies Martinez’s robustly active and spontaneous pseudo-representational painting style, replete with various signifiers from the artist’s personal iconographic lexicon. The checkered blockhead, a longstanding caricature from the Martinez-verse, makes an appearance within a landscape of thick brushstrokes and energetic, gestural mark-making. Rendered with bold forms, strong lines, highly textured surfaces, and a distinctive personal visual vernacular honed over many years, each body of work in this presentation conceals and reveals that which lives under the surface. Eddie Martinez (b. 1977, Groton Naval Base, CT) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Martinez’s unconventional practice has received growing institutional support with five museum solo shows in the last four years, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China in 2019, a show of new sculptures and paintings at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY in 2018, an exhibition that featured a rotating display of his recent works on paper at the Drawing Center, New York, NY in 2017, and an exhibition at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA in 2017. His works are represented in international public collections including the Aurora Museum, Shanghai, China; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; Hiscox Collection, London, UK; La Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Marciano Collection, Los Angeles, CA; Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Saatchi Collection, London, UK; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China, among others.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present an exhibition of Kishio Suga’s work on paper. His fifth solo presentation with the gallery, this show is the first comprehensive survey of his work in this medium, which has rarely been exhibited outside Japan. Suga’s investigation of paper has been an integral part of his practice since the beginning of his artistic career, occurring in parallel with the large-scale installations and wall-mounted assemblages for which he is best known. The earliest work in this exhibition, “Untitled” (1968), was made shortly after Suga graduated from Tama Art University, when he worked for one year as a part-time studio assistant to Sam Francis in Tokyo. Watching Francis create his Edge paintings by moving around large canvases laid on the floor, Suga was inspired to think about the relationship of center and periphery in his own emerging practice. Painted with bright acrylics sourced from Francis’ studio, “Untitled” (1968) consists of rectangular fields of vivid red and blue, permeated with English words in various states of obfuscation and erasure. These colliding fields of color and fragments of negated language reflect Suga’s incipient interest in the discrepancies between words and meaning, and the need to allow material to speak for itself. Only months after creating “Untitled” (1968), Suga turned away from painting and toward making site-specific installations out of natural and industrial materials such as paraffin, concrete, wood, branches, metal, rope, and wire. He and a small number of other artists who worked in similarly ephemeral modes became known as Mono-ha (“School of Things”). Deeply immersed in the theoretical writings of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Kitarō Nishida, Keiji Nishitani, and Mahāyāna Buddhism since his university years, Suga developed his own idiosyncratic philosophy of matter and space, which he articulates in terms of a holistic “interdependence” (“izon”) of all “things” (“mono”) “being left” (“hōchi”) in the “situations” (“jōkyō”) that unite them. As with Suga’s installations and assemblages, his works on paper show the evolution of the artist’s thought over the last five decades. During the 1970s, Suga experimented with various forms of mark-making and manipulation on different types of paper. In “Situation of Boundary” (1971) Suga applied diagonal strokes of white chalk to conjoined sheets of black sandpaper, emphasizing a unifying field that traverses the borders of multiple units within a greater whole. Suga also created geometric compositions out of tape, marker, ink, and torn edges, such as “Lateral Realm—174” (1974) and “Corner at Phases” (1975). By contrast, in “Quantity of Territory in Position” (1976) he employed frenzied, diagonal ballpoint pen strokes to counter the gridded order of graph paper. The early 1980s saw Suga continue to explore minimal interventions such as scoring corrugated cardboard in “Towards Order” (1981) and folding white paper to demarcate zones of space that he filled with gestural waves of pencil marks, as in “Traversing Things—11” (1982). Later in the decade, he resumed the use of brilliant fields of paint interspersed with pencil lines as a means of deconstructing the white expanse of the paper support, such as “Few Variations, Many Transitions” (1985). Suga further expanded his repertoire of painted interventions and types of support during the 1990s, creating more sprawling configurations of acrylic and mixed media on used envelopes and densely patterned wrapping papers. Since the 2000s, Suga has highlighted the duality of presence and absence by leaving geometric voids of unpainted space amid finely streaked grids of paint, such as in “Things that Go Against the Flow” (2007). Similarly, in “Oscillating Scenery” (2011), Suga dragged a ball of crumpled paper saturated with dark blue ink over a sheet of paper’s white expanse and affixed the ball to the end of the meandering line that it had traced. The work presents three-dimensional evidence of movement across a two-dimensional field—an almost calligraphic revelation of the fusion of material, line, gesture, and space. This presentation at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles coincides with a major solo museum exhibition in Japan and the release of an anthology of Suga’s essays translated into English. The Iwate Museum of Art is celebrating its 20th anniversary with “Kishio Suga: The Existence of ‘Things’ and the Eternity of ‘Site,’” a survey focusing on the artist’s relationship with his home region of Iwate Prefecture. Meanwhile, Skira Editore, Blum & Poe, and Mendes Wood DM have published “Kishio Suga: Writings, vol. 1, 1969–1979.” Edited by Andrew Maerkle, Ashley Rawlings, and Sen Uesaki, this is the first of an ambitious three-volume anthology that makes Suga’s thinking accessible to English readers as a comprehensive body of work for the first time. In spring 2023, Suga’s work will be included in “Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the first exhibition to explore Francis’ work in relation to ma and other aspects of Japanese aesthetics. Kishio Suga was born in Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, in 1944 and lives and works in Ito, Shizuoka Prefecture. In recent years, he has had major retrospectives at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy (2016); Dia: Chelsea, New York, NY (2016); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2015). Suga is frequently included in global survey exhibitions. Most recently, a re-creation of his groundbreaking outdoor installation “Law of Situation” (1971) was displayed in the Gaggiandre shipyard at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). His work is featured in many institutional collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Glenstone Foundation, Potomac, MD; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE; Long Museum, Shanghai, China; M+, Hong Kong, China; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; Pinault Collection, Venice, Italy; Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX; Tate Modern, London, UK; Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and the Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present “Syzygy,” the gallery’s third solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Theodora Allen. This presentation follows the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, “Saturnine,” which was held at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark in 2021. A book launch for the correlating monograph, edited and authored by curator Stephanie Cristello, will be hosted at the gallery in February. “We know we are supposed to make a wish, or capture them, if we see them fall. Hope you may, hope you might. Fast fire imparted with volumes of unspoken scripts (wishes should be made silently) gone in a flash. If our eyes could see desire, its pattern would decorate the sky where it sliced through—like the jagged lattice embedded in ice when it hardens too quickly. The slower water heals from liquid into solid, the more crystalline it becomes.

In the paintings of Los Angeles-based artist Theodora Allen on view in ‘Syzygy,’ the motif of shooting stars alongside stars in various evolutions—either burning out, exploding, or falling—measure acts of metamorphoses that inhabit spaces of flux. Allen’s visual lexicon, comprised of emblematic, esoteric, and personal sources, engages with themes surrounding cycles and regeneration—the making and unmaking of nature. Her paintings come into being through a process of removal; paint lifted off a surface to reveal the white ground beneath, before gradually introducing layers polluted by the addition of color, value, and opacity—a paradox of creation through deficit. As ciphers for introspection, the symbols of desire composed within Allen’s recent paintings reference the extremities of an inward and outward gaze.

The exhibition title, which refers to a term shared across fields of astronomy and psychology, speaks to the alignment of three celestial bodies in conjunction, or the harmony of contradicting forces. In the collection of five works on view, ranging from a large-scale triptych to more intimate distillations, Allen presents reflections and deflections: symbols of infinity interlock with the outline of an hourglass, hearts are transposed and divided by a bow and arrow, a shield is formed from the trails of a comet. The elemental opposites of fire and water, earth and air permeate all. Across the series there are allusions to the first genus of Narcissus flower (’N. Poeticus’), inspired by the myth of the hunter who remained ensnared in his double. Various permutations within the works—as well as the approach to their installation—are mirrored: they look for, and into, their likeness.

In Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ Narcissus drowns. In other versions of the tale, he dies of starvation and thirst. In each, narcissi flowers grow in his place along the water’s edge—trumpet-like centers of paperwhite petals bending forward toward the pool. In ‘Syzygy (Narcissus),’ 2021, the tripartite centerpiece of the exhibition, two shooting stars encircle each other against a firmament of glinting indigo—the clockwise movement of the stars, here as diamond portals, is marked by a trail of flames. In the center panel, a star burns in place. The scale of the canvases gives the impression of a series of doorways, or the panes of a dividing screen; proportions that delineate spaces either meant to be entered or hidden from view. Across deserts and forests, each of the subjects within Allen’s stars is a hunter. Illuminated in a silver blue cast—the light of a sky at dusk or dawn, of fire at its hottest point—these seekers point toward an inward prey.

In the artist’s series of distillation paintings—compositions that correspond to themes within the exhibition in their most reduced and succinct form—emblems of time and devotion are woven out of intersecting lines to exact an emotional index of geometry. The collection of compositions reads as either a diagram or coat of arms—a shape that evolved from its use as personal protection in battle into a signet of one’s origins. Likewise, the Syzygy chapter revisits the artist’s foundations of the Shields (2018) series, which featured hallucinogenic plants once used as poisons or medicine, sacraments or drugs (often both) throughout history. The antidote was the toxin, a therapy of curing same with same.

In his ‘Sonnets to Orpheus,’ Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “Even the starry union is a fraud. Yet gladly let us trust the valid symbol / for a moment. It is all we need.” [1] In times of great uncertainty, certain symbols emerge as something to confide in—like the superstition of spotting a shooting star spreading before the dawn of the industrial era in America, or the heart as the organ of the mind in ancient Rome. In deciphering the signatures (within us) that compose these external signs, there lies the instinctive need for reflection: of the self, of the self in others. We look toward the future regardless of the condition of the present. We find patterns in the past to understand our current moment. We remain on the hunt for shooting stars, those vehicles of desire, emitting their last light, brilliantly falling toward earth’s surface before they expire.”

—Stephanie Cristello Theodora Allen (b. 1985, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including “Saturnine,” Kunsthal Arhaus, Arhaus, Denmark (2021) and “Vigil,” Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA (2017). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including “5,471 miles,” Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA (2020) and “Golden State,” Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ (2014). Theodora Allen was chosen for the 2021 Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency in Corsicana, TX and the 2011 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Residency in Skowhegan, ME.  She holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, CA and a BFA from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. [1] Rilke, Rainer Maria, “Sonnet XI,” in “Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 161.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present the first U.S. solo exhibition of São Paulo-based artist Sonia Gomes. This presentation serves as an introduction to her practice, spanning key bodies of work integral to the artist’s oeuvre, and a new site-specific installation produced over the course of a year and a half. Sonia Gomes combines found and gifted textiles with scavenged materials such as driftwood, fishnet, buttons, and birdcages, often bound by thread and wire, to create abstract multi-dimensional compositions that reclaim the Afro-Brazilian experience. Employing historically feminized materials and crafts, she creates powerful assemblages that capture and celebrate marginalized histories, rendering those of women, people of color, and countless anonymous individuals, visible. From a mother’s wedding dress and a grandmother’s towel to tablecloths and bed throws, the artist invites each item to tell its story—memories and traces of identity that she weaves into the grand narrative conjured in sculptural form. She says: "There's a relationship between time and reflection—all the materials that I work with are an exercise in exploring the soul of these objects. It is closely linked to the intimate history of other people." At the entry point of the exhibition, a sculpture rendered from a broken birdcage hangs in solitude. From Gomes’s "A vida não me assusta" or “Life Doesn’t Scare Me” series, the work conjures both the radical freedom of a bird and its existence within the constraints of a cage. Citing Maya Angelou as a reference for these compositions, Gomes applies an element of gravity to each work by inserting a single rock inside. "Sinfonia Branca" (2021) or “White Symphony,” is a large-scale site-specific hanging installation of pendulum-like swathed structures in pale fabrics and laces. Together these sculptures from the artist’s "Pendentes" or “Pendent” series generate a labyrinthine presence. The work is installed in dialogue with the shifting shadows and natural light that pass through the gallery during the course of a day. These forms verge between cosmic and biomorphic, with tendrils like umbilical cords. Gomes has been working with such fiber sculptures since the mid 2000s, initially as vehicles for performance work tied to Carnival and the Tropicália movement. In an adjacent gallery, sculptures from her "Raízes" or “Roots” series rest on the floor, with cocoon-like and bulbous fabric twined around tree roots. The wall works that hang nearby, called "Patuás," are soft forms that incorporate amulets such as coins, written messages, and sacred herbs. These sculptures channel her childhood years in the Brazilian city of Caetanópolis, where she witnessed her grandmother, a benzedeira, perform Afro-Brazilian spiritual rites and divinations. "Quando o sol nascer azul" (2021) or “When the Sun Rises in Blue,” is an arresting wall work in blue that recalls the sea and the movement of the waves. Crafted from a range of fabrics—some that have been in Gomes’s collection for almost twenty years—"Quando o sol nascer azul" is layered with fish casting nets and Renascença lace salvaged by her assistant in his hometown in northeastern Brazil. Sonia Gomes lives and works in São Paulo. Gomes's first institutional solo exhibition in Europe premiered in 2019, at the Museum Frieder Burda, Salon Berlin and Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany. Her first major institutional solo exhibition in Brazil toured in 2018, at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea of Rio de Janeiro. Her work has been exhibited in significant institutional group exhibitions such as the Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK (2021); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2021); "Revival," National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2017); "New Shamans/Novos Xamãs: Brazilian Artists," Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL, traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2016); "Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016," Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Los Angeles, CA (2016); 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2015); "Art & Textiles—Fabric as Material and Concept in Modern Art," Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany (2013); "A Nova Mão Afro-Brasileira," Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil (2013); and "Out of Fashion. Textile in International Contemporary Art," Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Aalborg, Denmark (2013). Her work is represented in public collections worldwide including the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Muzeum Susch, Zernez, Switzerland; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present "En Garde / On God," Umar Rashid’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. In new paintings, drawings, and sculptural work, Rashid presents a new chapter in his fifteen-year-long project of documenting the fictitious history of the Frenglish Empire (1648-1880). Informed by the storylines that are encoded into the canonical narratives of empires and their colonies, and even more so by those that are marginalized and omitted from the historical record, Rashid conjures a world replete with complex iconographic languages that use classifying systems, maps, and cosmological diagrams. Channeling the visual lexicons of hip hop, ancient and modern pop culture, gang and prison life, and revolutionary movements throughout time, in these works Rashid seeks to underline the roles of race, gender, class, and power in the problematic history of recounting history. "In his one-paragraph story 'On Exactitude in Science,' Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges evokes an unnamed, unlocated empire so taken with precision in the art of mapmaking that its cartographers eventually produced 'a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.' Later generations did not share this taste for exactitude and, failing to see the point of such a map, abandoned it: 'In the Deserts of the West, still today,' the story ends, 'there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.' Goodbye geography: a discipline gone so awry it managed, if only for an instant, to let the map take over the territory. Consider this ruined map: an onion-skin paper copy of a whole empire, crumbled, ripped and torn to garlands, reduced to strings of origami mausoleums to the real world. All so uncanny and grotesque until, perhaps, following the trail of Borges’s facetious clues, we come to ponder precisely what in an empire is tangible beyond words. Sure, the land that empires claim can be captured, dug into, turned over, occupied, and marched upon. But empires are also made of stuff less concrete than land—myths, lies, dreams propped up or trampled, stories sweetly whispered into some ears and loudly hammered into others. Empires are built on mountains of corpses, but the real issue is that corpses will speak if you let them. Empires may glory in, or turn away in shame from, blood spilled; either way they get, and write, over it, tying together true accounts with golden strings of make believe. This is also the way imperial maps are made. They are designed to cover endless expanses in a slick veneer of words, the better to hide the endlessly overlapping layers of lives and waves of deeds, each round covering the last, building monuments here and eroding them there, shaping the landscape beneath. Still, every corpse has a story, though imperial narratives may require such tales be discarded. They poke through, punch holes, always a challenge to the official story, always threatening to ruin the purported totalizing exactitude of imperial cartography. In 1834, the poet Lydia Sigourney Huntley prefaced her 'Indian Names' with the following question: 'How can the red men be forgotten, while so many of our states and territories, bays, lakes, and rivers, are indelibly stamped by names of their giving?' Huntley was playing coy: Native Americans did not give these names so much as Europeans exacted and repurposed them to hide their violent deeds. Behold this feat of cold alchemy: words summoning a nation into being, cooking up countries out of carnage, and vanishing people into thin air. Imperial maps do not lay literally over any land; they do it figuratively, and their 'tattered ruins' are everywhere, in names marking the land in permanent ink. What if you set out to reverse the process? *** Umar Rashid once went by Frohawk Two Feathers—a nom de plume he gave himself and has now given up. This shedding mirrors the enormous task on which he set out years ago: to uncover and represent what lies underneath the names on the tattered map we so often mistake for history. Rashid’s work reverses that of Borges’ cartographers: wherever he goes, he raises lost, unborn provinces and empires out of the relics of their dreams. Rashid’s work does not dabble in the pretend exactitude of Borges’s uncanny cartography; it excavates the states buried in the margins of unread history books. It summons the truth that lurks between their lines. Before it was the thirty-first state in the union, California was an independent republic for less than a month; it had been two provinces of the First Mexican Empire, once independence stripped it of its former name of New Spain. In Alta and Baja California, provinces the size of a continent, European power resided in a network of Jesuit missions that doubled as military forts, sites of temporal and secular oppression all in one: so many names of saints strung on maps like the beads of a rosary. Before the monks raised their crosses, conquistadores had drawn the path and, again, always given names. Faced for the first time with the gigantic region, they glued the territory to a dream map: Montalvo’s sixteenth-century bestseller, 'The Adventures of Esplandían,' depicts the island of California, populated only by strong Black women, tamers of bloodthirsty griffons, and ruled by Queen Calafia. The heathen Amazons hear of Europe’s religious wars and see a chance for the world to learn of their courage, but the California girls, their griffons, and their queen are subsumed into European storytelling. Calafia marries a knight and comes back to California. Game over, says the narrator: 'We decline to say more about what became of them because, if we wished to do so, it would be a never-ending story.' There must be a beginning and an end; borders in place and time—however arbitrary—that reinforce fables of uniqueness and hide how much of history is made of the same mistakes. The Frenglish Empire, whose history Rashid’s works chronicle in every corner of the known world, may have never actually existed; yet you will recognize the missions, the warring factions, snippets of colonies and empires reshaped as global tides of war and trade meet numberless individual trajectories. You will hear familiar accents in its tales of heroism and petty opportunism; in its portraits of heroes and villains—bloodthirsty, gold-hungry colonizers and the religious officials who absolve them; former imperial soldiers finding in alliances with indigenous rebels the true meaning of freedom; peasant women forced into lives of vengeance and violence; hapless rulers killed in their sleep and the nameless masses who cheer the deed. The artifacts, the battle-worn flags, the ancient maps: the remains of days that, though they never were, will make you wonder how much you actually know about those that have been. And why. 'En garde': walk in armed and ready. Though playful and humorous, Rashid’s work should not be taken lightly. It comes bearing a challenge: when you dare to look through the tears in the map, whose history do you see? Which of these nations would claim you?" — Gregory Pierrot, Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford Umar Rashid (b. 1976, Chicago, IL) received his BA in cinema and photography from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL. This past year, his work was featured at The Huntington and the Hammer Museum as part of the biennial "Made in LA 2020: a version." Recent institutional solo exhibitions include "What is the color when black is burned? (The Gold War Part 1)," University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ (2018); and "The Belhaven Republic (A Delta Blues)," University of Memphis Galleries A and B, Memphis, TN (2017). Rashid’s work is represented in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; Jorge Pérez Collection, Miami, FL; Mount Holyoke Art Museum, South Hadley, MA; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa, among others.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present Los Angeles-based artist Penny Slinger’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. This presentation coincides with the fifty-year anniversary of Slinger’s iconic 1971 artists’ book and collage series "50% The Visible Woman" and celebrates the milestone with a new and expanded edition of the publication. With never before exhibited selections from this historical body of work, alongside new compositions, Slinger shares her long-standing investigation into the mapping and unveiling of the feminine subconscious. Originally created in 1969 as a hand-constructed snakeskin-bound book for her thesis project at the Chelsea College of Art, "50% The Visible Woman" was Slinger’s response to her discovery of surrealism and its pivotal impact on her practice. An homage to Max Ernst, the book includes photocollage and concrete poetry, artwork with which Slinger sought to rectify the fraught portrayals of women and the void of feminine authorship in a male-dominated surrealist milieu. She says: "Having discovered the magic of surrealism, I wanted to employ its tools and methods to create a language for the feminine psyche to express itself.” The book’s binding alternates between sheets of poetry and photocollage imagery; her poems are typed onto semi-transparent tissue paper, allowing the prose to interact directly with their visual counterparts beneath. Words take on curvilinear shapes in response to the images surfacing below them. One work on view from this series, never before exhibited—"The Dialectics" (1969)—is a totem of female body parts, floating, dismembered. Some parts appear as didactic diagrams, and others are plucked from an image of a woman in mime costume, shadows reaching in every direction. The corresponding poetry reads: "The dialectics of experience present a new hierarchy evoked in the shadows a presence using emblems like a clown A collage exploits itself A corner seeking identity in its absence of form" Slinger appropriates surrealism’s language and themes—woman's body as object, dream-state as entrance into the unconscious, and sexual and bodily desires—and applies them in analysis of surrealism itself and its culture. Slinger inserts herself into this art historical lineage, and takes ownership of a visual lexicon that had previously objectified her. On the occasion of this special anniversary exhibition, Slinger collaborates with musician Lydia Lunch on sonic accompaniment to her collages. Alongside these historical and formative works, Slinger presents a new photo collage series titled My Body in a Box. Created during the pandemic while sheltering in place, the artist explores the psychological entrapment and fears that accompany the experience. As Slinger has done since the 1960s, here she uses her own image and body as subject to process a range of feelings and reactions, photographed by her creative partner Dhiren Dasu. Accompanied by her poetry and prose that are evocative of states of mind and being, Slinger’s offering is one of pain and poignancy, as well as transcendence. The 2021 edition of Slinger’s artists’ book "50% The Visible Woman" presents the artist’s series of photomontage works and poetry unabridged for the first time, following the hand-constructed version from 1969, and the out-of-print abridged edition from 1971 released by indie press Narcis Publishing Limited. Lauded at the time for its originality and poetic narrative, "Rolling Stone Magazine" remarked in the November 1973 issue: “This book will become as important on your bookshelf as Sgt. Pepper is on your record rack.” The 2021 edition also features a new conversation transcribed between Slinger and fellow artist and friend Linder. Linder says: “When I first saw that copy of '50% The Visible Woman'—which a friend of a friend had actually stolen from a library—I was mesmerized. I’d never seen a book like that before. I used to spend hours looking at it, turning the pages over and over again, trying to work out its magic. I sensed that something really profound was happening, and I couldn’t quite work out how that magic worked.” Available for pre-order now. Penny Slinger has authored and illustrated numerous publications and has exhibited her work internationally. Recent institutional group exhibitions include "The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree," Camden Art Centre, London, UK (2020); "Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution," British Museum, London, UK (2020); "Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage," Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland (2019); "Visible Women," Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Norwich, UK (2018); "Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Writings," Tate St Ives, Cornwall, UK (2018); "The House of Fame," convened by Linder, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2018); "The Beguiling Siren Is Thy Crest," Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland (2017); "Women House," Monnaie de Paris, France; traveled to National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2017); "History Is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain," Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2015); "Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s: Works from the Sammlung Verbund, Vienna," Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2015); "Lips Painted Red," Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim, Norway (2013); "The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art," Tate St Ives, Cornwall, UK (2009); and "Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism," Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2009); among many more.

Mark Grotjahn: Backcountry

Blum & Poe is pleased to present an exhibition of ceramic sculptures by Chiba, Japan-based artist Kazunori Hamana alongside works made in collaboration with fellow artist Yukiko Kuroda. This exhibition follows the announcement of Hamana’s representation this summer. The surfaces of Hamana’s sculptures are variously rough, finger-textured, cracked, and fissured. His large and delicate vessels are made from natural clay sourced from Shiga Prefecture in Japan, each finished with Hamana’s own mineral glazes. Inspired by traditional Japanese "tsubo," functional clay jars dating back to prehistoric times, he creates each sculpture by hand, making use of improvisation and experimentation and cultivating new, inventive techniques in shaping, glazing, coloring, and firing. After the vessels are fired, he places them outside of his studio for the natural elements to mark and transform, determining their final form. Irregular and imperfect in shape, and sometimes imbued with geometric shapes and abstract symbols, his pots resemble ancient terra-cotta objects that were hidden in the soil for ages. Hamana collaborates with Yukiko Kuroda on vessels that undergo the process of "kintsugi" (the art of repairing broken pottery). Both based in a rural village in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, Hamana and Kuroda pursue the principles of "kintsugi"—refusing waste and celebrating the act of recycling—in both their art practices and in the daily routines of their personal lives and philosophies. Their collaboration began with one of Hamana’s vessel that was damaged by accident—alongside traditional Japanese mending methods, Kuroda used large metal staples to hold the fractures together following the ancient Chinese technique of riveting—the idiosyncratic beauty that resulted spawned a new series of works made in partnership. Kuroda’s interventions follow the traditional practice of treating the ceramic surfaces with the combination of colored "urushi" (Japanese lacquer) and gold, silver, and pewter, but also include adjoining flaking or cast-off layers of ceramics from other vessels which are created organically during the pottery process. Additionally, she integrates unconventional found materials, often sourced from her neighborhood. Kuroda’s home was previously a local farmer’s and still hosts a variety of abandoned farming materials, many of which find their way into her "kintsugi" practice, such as traces of bamboo baskets or antique paper. She also marks Hamana’s pots with remnants of rice grain harvested from his organic rice fields, leaving strong lines and adding new visual landscapes. Each pot is treated as an individual entity with specific needs. Accepting that repair might not be the solution in some cases, Hamana and Kuroda’s collaborations embrace each unique narrative, and the natural flow of the life cycle which is transient and impermanent. Kazunori Hamana (b. 1969, Osaka, Japan) lives and works in Chiba, Japan. His work has been exhibited in public art institutions including the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2021); Towada Art Center, Towada, Japan (2017); and Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan (2016). His work was showcased in a two-artist exhibition at Blum & Poe, Tokyo, Japan (2020) and a group exhibition at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA, curated by Takashi Murakami, which later traveled to Blum & Poe, New York, NY (2015). Yukiko Kuroda (b. 1968, Shizuoka, Japan) lives and works in Chiba, Japan. She is an artist who embraces cracks, chips, and fissures in ceramic works, salvaging and generating new forms from pieces that are otherwise considered broken. She began collaborating with Kazunori Hamana in 2017. Her works have been included in group shows including most recently at Amelie, Maison d’art, Paris, France in 2021.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present the first major U.S. survey of work by Onomichi, Japan-based artist Yukinori Yanagi. This is Yanagi’s fourth presentation with the gallery, following his solo show at Blum & Poe Tokyo in 2019 and his participation in the group exhibitions “Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s” (Los Angeles, 2019) and “Mountains Carrying Suns” (Tokyo, 2021). Having resided in the U.S. in the late 1980s and 1990s, obtaining his MFA in sculpture from Yale University School of Art in 1990, Yanagi was first recognized on the world stage at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 with “World Flag Ant Farm” (1990). As a monumental process-based installation, this work featured 180 national flags—recognized by the United Nations, including colonized countries—each made out of acrylic panels of painted sand and connected by plastic tubes through which ants burrowed and effectively broke down both physical and geo-political borders. First presented at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in 1991, “World Flag Ant Farm 2020” will be featured in the current exhibition in an updated version, comprising approximately 200 national flags that reflect radical shifts in world politics over the last thirty years. As his former professor Vito Acconci once stated in 1990, Yanagi "attempts to join natural processes with cultural mechanisms... that then go on to have a life and duration all their own." Yanagi’s machine-perfect sculptures and installations probe the contested boundaries or limits of politically and ideologically constructed territories and national myths. In “Banzai Corner 2020” Yanagi uses the Ultraman figurine, a half-extraterrestrial and half-Japanese superhero who fights to save Japan from aliens. In this installation, Yanagi aligns the figures in perfectly alternating rows of red and silver forming a quarter of a circle, positioned toward two adjacent mirrors lining the right angle of a room. The reflections of the figures on both mirrors create the illusion of a 360-degree circle which forms the pre-war imperial flag, a red circle with radiating white lines. Both arms of each figurine are raised in a “banzai” gesture, recalling wartime kamikaze pilots, soldiers, and citizens hailing to the emperor. The irony behind this work is that the original creator of Ultraman is from Okinawa (the southernmost island of Japan), and according to Yanagi, likely critical of the use of national myth to retain ethnic homogeneity to promote Japanese nationalist identity. By using mirrors to indicate the constructed quality of national unity, Yanagi deconstructs the “illusion” of Ultraman’s contribution to national unity, revealing the incompleteness of Japanese identity. Yanagi’s work also investigates borders or the spaces at the edges of a boundary, where oppression is felt most by inhabitants and the manipulation of myth and control is exerted over citizenry and minorities. “Wandering Position - Alcatraz” comprises three large-scale drawings in the size of prison cells from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. Yanagi conducted fieldwork at the prison for two weeks in 1996 after learning about a second-generation Japanese-American, Tomoya Kawakita, who was charged for treason during World War II, sentenced for life at Alcatraz, but eventually pardoned by President Kennedy in 1963. The drawings are traces of red crayon made from following ants in each of these prison spaces. Another work created during this residency, “Broken Glass on Map” (1996), is a U.S. map culled from discarded glass shards from the site. “Article 9” (1994) is a floor installation of multiple beams dispersed with red Japanese neon text that break up the infamous Article 9 clause in the Japanese Constitution declaring the renunciation of war. The text exposes the fraught history of the clause, which was originally written in English and administered by the U.S. during the American Occupation, delimiting Japan’s military capacity. Later translated into Japanese and retranslated into English, this clause reveals the continued ambiguities in the meaning, intent, and agency of national law and international communication. Similarly, the language of patriotism is interrogated in “Loves me / Loves me not,” which features a chrysanthemum—the Japanese imperial seal—at the center with its brass petals, dispersed over a blood-red carpet, each accompanying the artwork’s title in multiple languages. Finally, following “Pacific” (1996) and “Akitsushima 50-I/II” (2019) previously exhibited in Los Angeles and Tokyo spaces of the gallery respectively, this presentation will feature a brand-new installation of “Nagato” (2020), a cast-iron replica scaled at 1:70 of a World War II dreadnought battleship. First commissioned by the Imperial Japanese Army in 1920, this was one of the last surviving battleships that became a detonation target and sank at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Initially taken from a plastic model kit and retaining the sand mold on the frames, this installation forces us to consider the artistry of violence through the cultural obsession with the technical craft of war machinery. The impact of Yanagi’s work is his dual stance in which as Acconci also stated, "he takes on the position of both victim and surveyor, and he urges his audience to assume a similar posture... of being both amused and at the same time possibly intimidated.” Yanagi appropriates and deconstructs myths, signs, and symbols to provoke the fraught visual and cultural languages of war, violence, national identity, and technological advancements that continue to haunt us today. Yukinori Yanagi (b. Fukuoka, Japan, 1959) lives and works in Onomichi, Japan. Yanagi’s work is represented in notable public collections worldwide, including the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Boston, MA; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara, Jakarta, Indonesia; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia; Tate Gallery, London, UK; and the Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan; among many more.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present “Nidos y Nudos / Nests & Knots,” Mexico City-based artist Pia Camil’s third solo presentation with the gallery.  Pia Camil’s work takes a critical approach to modernism's legacy, exploring themes such as US-Mexico relations, the politics of consumerism, and the invisibility of feminized labor, often articulated through imagery from the Mexican urban landscape. Recently with emphasis on the importance of collectivity through public participation, she explores these territories through performance, painting, installation, sculpture, and film. Camil’s latest exhibition, “Nidos y Nudos,” was created during a pandemic-prompted uprooting from Mexico City to the rural countryside. Precipitated by the stark contrast between one environment and the next, Camil spent the last year looking to nature for lessons in collective intelligence and the building of symbiotic architectures. What results are two new bodies of work, “Nidos (Nests)” and “Nudos (Knots).”

The ten works on view from the “Nidos” series are organic totem-like forms of concrete, mortar, and recycled newspaper in bright pigments. Camil’s sculptures explore the concept of the nest, focusing in particular on the termite nest as one of the architectural wonders of the living world—this body of work is a meditation on its labyrinthine design and its symbolism. The termite nest is built by the collective action of workers in a colony, a swarm intelligence that creates elaborate structural motifs that allow for efficient ventilation and temperature control, yielding mounds 300 times bigger than the insects themselves. Continuing with Camil’s signature leitmotif of transforming mass-market, used, and recycled materials, these structures are coated with a mixture of cement and newspaper. The irregular surfaces contain small “windows” to peek into, to glimpse a moment from everyday news with particular points of views and stories, creating a connection between object and viewer. These works are a post-pandemic rumination on the nest as protector, enclosure, and incubator for the seed of a species. Presented alongside, the sister series “Nudos” is comprised of works on paper with coiling, overlapping lines of ink and vibrant oil stick over hand-smudged locally sourced clay. Informed by calligraphy, storytelling, and multispecies feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s book “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene” (2016), Camil’s drawings channel Haraway’s concept of “sympoiesis, or making-with,” rather than “autopoiesis, or self-making.” The drawing patterns suggest pathways or messages made by termites during their daily activities. These forms reference collective creation but also the act of getting tied up, like hands in a cat's cradle—another reference to Haraway’s string figures—symbolizing a speculative fabulation. In this vein of cultivating a kind of practice that would provide the means for building a more livable future, Camil’s “Nudos” are material-semiotic maps to other worlds.  Pia Camil’s (b. 1980, Mexico City) work is currently on view in her solo exhibition “Three Works” at MOCA Tucson, AZ (2021). Recent museum exhibitions include “Unflagging,” Ballroom Marfa, TX (2020); “Velo Revelo,” Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2020); “Here Comes the Sun,” performance at Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2019); “Fade into Black,” Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2019); “Bara, Bara, Bara,” Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland (2019); “Telón de Boca,” Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico (2018); “Split Wall,” Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2018); “Fade into Black,” SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2018); “Bara, Bara, Bara,” Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX (2017); “A Pot for a Latch,” New Museum, New York, NY (2016), traveled to Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, CA; “Skins,” Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH (2015); and “Cuadrado Negro,” Basque Museum-Centre of Contemporary Art, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain (2013).

Blum & Poe is pleased to present Tokyo-based artist Kenjirō Okazaki’s "TOPICA PICTUS / La Cienega," a suite of twenty abstract paintings, each paired with a short essay and reference image(s), which function as key components to provide multi-layered experiences to audiences. This is Okazaki’s fourth presentation with the gallery and follows the recent announcement of his representation. In an ongoing series that now comprises over 150 works since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the works on view were made in response to the unprecedented condition of isolated co-existence, the suspension of time and space, and the perceived loss of tactile or concrete experience, which has significantly impacted our social reality. For the artist, this condition has provided the “possibility of going everywhere because we cannot go anywhere,” an opportunity to go on a solitary journey. In the process of making these paintings, Okazaki finds that the multitude of issues that historically face painting is akin to the discovery of a place. Namely, each painting confronts a unique issue and allows for a unique "topos" (place) to emerge. The term "topica" in "TOPICA PICTUS" is derived from Aristotle’s "Ars Topica" (The Topics) on the art of the dialectic, and is associated with "topos," which indicates a place. In the course of his work, Okazaki recalled not only art historical objects such as African masks, decorative and colored manuscripts, Kamakura-era picture scrolls, Momoyama-era Japanese paintings, Renaissance, Impressionist, and Modernist art, but also medieval maps, images of Dumbo, Pearl Harbor, and Google Earth. We, the viewers＝readers, will read the unexpected network of sensibility and thought that spreads among various literary and artistic works, transcending time, space, and cultural differences. Okazaki likens this process to the three-body problem in celestial mechanics: “when there are three or more stars with mass enough to influence each other's gravity, the motion of these stars becomes almost unpredictable. . . Multiple activities work and intertwine, and the whole thing moves.” The paintings do not function as formal correlations to the reference work but as creative cues that encode Okazaki’s distinct visual and literary narratives that continue to circumnavigate a topos. In his quadriptych—"Antaninaomby / Ataokoloinona (Water a Strange Thing) 水のヘンテコなもの; Kilimanjaro / Wakonyingo (Bring negative spirits) カラッポのたましいを運ぶ; Asase Ya / 河を産めば畑をうるおすさ; Nyame / 空はなんでもみているさ (2020)," his references span mathematical symmetry, African mythology, Bedu plank masks, Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s human proportion drawings, anthropomorphic seventeenth century maps, and David Smith sculptures. "Hina-phases of the moon, Tunaroa-the father of eels / 月日の満ち欠け" (2020) brings together a constellation of narratives. In his text, we learn how the “lake in the sea” shape of Tongareva (Penrhyn atoll of the Cook Islands) resembles the Google Earth view of the island in the center: a wholly oceanic earth outlined by a thin atmospheric layer. Okazaki recounts the legend of Hina, a Polynesian goddess associated with the moon and responsible for the creation of coconuts, which are said to have grown from the burial site of the decapitated head of her lover, Tuna, god of the eels, after a heavy rain. Okazaki links the split form of the inner white coconut flesh, "te roro o te Tuna" (Tuna’s brains), to the shape of Tongareva. There is an implicit reference to "Weeping Coconuts" (1951) by Frida Kahlo (notably in LACMA’s collection), where tears fall from the (Tuna’s) eyes of a coconut. The undulating dark, purple curve in the top left corner of Okazaki’s painting ties the narratives together—Tongareva’s shape, the moon, Kahlo—perhaps a forewarning of Earth’s water crisis in the post-Anthropocene era. In another work, the clear-cut split down the top and bottom of the wooden frame of "Open Sea, Stormy Weather / 潮水の波、真水の滝" (2020) articulates the vertical break between the horizontal purple and black strokes on the left and the foamy blue cascade on the right. While there are clear formal cues of the fierce perpendicular movement of crossing wind and rain in John Constable’s "Rainstorm over the Sea" (c. 1824–1828), or the visceral texture of the rolling waves in Claude Monet’s "At Sea, Stormy Weather" (1880), Okazaki also captures the sensation of immersion and rebirth, embodied in Kaihō Yushō’s "Dragon and Clouds" (1599), depicting a powerful dragon emerging out of a spiraling cloud. In this way, "TOPICA PICTUS" involves a multiplicity of places (a set of issues) generated from the artist’s creative thought processes. A compilation of essays accompanying each work in "TOPICA PICTUS" will be published by Iwanami Shoten this fall. Kenjirō Okazaki (b. 1955, Tokyo, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo. His work was featured in independent curator Mika Yoshitake’s 2019 two-part exhibition at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, "Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s." His work has been exhibited in institutional solo exhibitions including at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan (2020); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota, Japan (2020 and 2019); Kaze-no-sawa Museum, Kurihara, Japan (2016); BankArt29, Yokohama, Japan (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan (2009); Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Karuizawa, Japan (2002); and Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Agen, Agen, France (1994). His work is represented in the permanent collections of Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan; Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan; Rachofsky Collection, Dallas TX; among many other museums. Okazaki’s publications include "Abstract Art As Impact: Analysis of Modern Art" (Aki Shobō, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 Ministry of Education Award in Fine Arts, and "Renaissance: Condition of Experience" (Chikuma Shobō, 2001/Bungeishunjū Gakugei Library, 2014). A revered professor, he founded and directed the Yotsuya Art Studium in 2004. He is a recipient of the 2014 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He is currently a visiting professor at Musashino Art University and University of Tokyo.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present "FRESH," an exhibition of new paintings by Tokyo-based artist Tomoo Gokita. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and the first dedicated to his renewed engagement with painting in color. Whether working in greyscale or in color, Gokita’s paintings have long been characterized by their psychologically charged subject matter: uncanny portraits, disquieting still lifes, and dream-like abstractions. The cast of cultural archetypes seen in his works of the past decade—from wrestlers and starlets to dancers and bureaucrats—were initially drawn from photographs the artist found in vintage magazines and newspapers. Once immersed in the process of applying paint to canvas, he would spontaneously distort these images. In his recent paintings, however, Gokita no longer refers to printed matter: the figures and forms emerge directly from his imagination. More ethereal and amorphous than before, Gokita’s supernatural figures are at once angelic and demonic, reminiscent of androids, aliens, and other undefinable chimeras. They recall the ominous creatures of sci-fi B-movies while evoking the vernaculars of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Giorgio De Chirico, Francis Bacon, and Philip Guston. This conflation of the subconscious and the conscious is mirrored in the creative process itself, in which Gokita often paints and repaints the subject, sometimes changing the orientation of the canvas mid-way through, creating both literal and psychological palimpsests of rejected, reconciled, and mutated forms. Although Gokita is widely known for working in greyscale, color has been a recurring feature of his practice since the beginning of his career. Some of his earliest paintings from the 2000s were landscapes and abstractions executed in the similar muted greens, yellows, and pinks seen in the current body of work. He likens this tone to faded photographs and magazine pages. At the end of the same decade, he produced a distinctive series of cloudy abstractions in blue. Gokita’s return to color in the 2020s has given the artist a newfound sense of liberation in his expressive range. Reflecting on this shift in his practice, the artist states, “Miles Davis writes about not fearing change in his autobiography too. So I decided to change.” Blum & Poe will publish a new book on Tomoo Gokita in conjunction with this exhibition. Designed by Brian Roettinger, this 272-page publication compiles dozens of Gokita’s paintings amid a vast array of other imagery, ranging from casually taken Polaroids and photoshoots, to his designs for zines, T-shirts, book covers, and album covers dating back to his former career as a graphic designer. This publication features an essay by Jamieson Webster, the first to examine Gokita’s images through the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis. Webster writes: “his work, with its emphasis (at times) on realistic figuration, is made uncanny by giving it an aura of today’s aggressive human relationships and the sheer fact of a culture of constant surveillance. Indeed what is uncanny is putting into his work the affective climate of the super-ego—showing that we live in a time that has pushed us to the limit of life and death. Our true aesthetic is the uncanny.” This exhibition also coincides with Tomoo Gokita’s first solo museum presentation outside Japan, on view at Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX, from June 12 to August 22. Tomoo Gokita (b. 1969, Tokyo, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo. His recent series of color paintings received their worldwide debut in "New Images of Man," curated by Alison Gingeras and held at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2020). Major recent museum solo exhibitions include "PEEKABOO" at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2018), and a retrospective, "THE GREAT CIRCUS," at Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Sakura, Japan (2014). His work has also been featured in notable surveys such as "Wonderful My Art," Kawaguchiko Museum of Art, Yamanashi, Japan (2013); "The Unseen Relationship: Form and Abstraction," Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Sakura, Japan (2012); "Gateway: Japan," Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2011); "New York Minute," Macro Future Museum, Rome, Italy (2009); and "Collected Visions," Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2009). Gokita’s work is included in institutional collections such as the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; and the X Museum, Beijing, China.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Eddie Martinez. This is the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery, following the announcement of his representation last fall. Alison M. Gingeras: Tell me about the flowers. I don't know a lot about your process when you’re working in a figurative mode. Eddie Martinez: My process is straightforward. These are just still life paintings. Except, they are not from life. They are these fantastical flowers. When I am painting these things, it is pretty basic. It is just an object. AG: Do you start from an archetype? There are certain floral forms that repeat from canvas to canvas. Is there an archetypal image of a still life in your head that you generate permutations from? EM: Yeah, there always is a big cartoon flower. Sort of like Christopher Wool who adopted that cartoony daisy a long time ago. That daisy is always there, sort of tilting to the left. Then generally, there is a mushroom. And there are some circular things like berries. AG: Is there a particular reason you paint them? EM: My initial thought is no. But then, if I think about where I grew up and the local vegetation of those places like Florida and California, I can’t help but see the connection and the long-distance memory of that and how it has impacted me. Both of my parents always kept potted plants, interesting ones, like weirdo succulents that looked like peas on a string and those little ones that look like a butt. I was obsessed with the Venus flytraps you could get on your way outta Publix. "Little Shop of Horrors" made a big impact on me. At one point I kinda thought about titling this show “Feed me, Seymour” but I guess I wimped out. AG: And are these still life pictures a vehicle for something else in your work, formally speaking? EM: Definitely. The composition is there, and it is basically the same. And then it allows me that space to play with color, shape, and line. AG: Is there an automatism going on with these paintings? When I look at your abstractions, I read them as part of an art historical lineage, coming from automatic drawing processes. How much of that is also happening in these more figurative works? EM: It is. But I think it is more about the automatism that comes with the color and the shapes because I do want them to retain some kind of floweriness. The lines are a little more controlled as far as wanting them to look like flowers versus an abstraction, where the line can be all over the place. I think the freedom comes with the color and shape in these. AG: I also like how some of them are whited out, becoming ghosts of themselves. EM: Exactly, there is a lot of freedom and automatic movement in those. But I think that they often start with a skeleton. AG: Do they start from drawing? EM: I draw a lot so they generally start from a drawing, or sometimes I will just visually chop them up after I have made some and make a new one. AG: Do you paint from that drawing process, or do you paint it directly onto the canvas? How built-up are these? EM: You mean texture-wise? AG: Or between the texture and the image. Do you work out some things on paper and then directly paint onto the canvas? EM: I don't work on the paper that much. I just do a line drawing, and how much of it goes on there depends. Sometimes I could lay down the base, be really light with it, and be happy with that. Or sometimes I paint over it a bunch. Then you get that automatic texture buildup. Sometimes I will add things, like some kind of detritus, studio trash and baby wipes. AG: Do you have them fixed to the canvas? EM: One way or the other with paint or glue. But sometimes I paint them into the canvas. AG: It is so hard to see on the images of the paintings. It doesn't translate. EM: I know. I am not going to try and make them sound like there is some mystical thing in them. They are just flowers, as simple as that. Then all the other things that happen are in my general studio practice. It is not like all of a sudden, because I am painting flowers, I am going to paint them hyperrealistically or something extreme. AG: Art historically speaking, are you looking at anything specific? Obviously, the history of the flower as a subject is very rich and super interesting. How much are you thinking about that history? EM: Certain things are just burned into my brain at this point. Matisse's handling of flowers is definitely one of the most important to me. AG: What is it about Matisse particularly? EM: Just everything; they are so wispy. It looks like they were never really thought of, but they are so considered at the same time. I think they are amazing. I also like Picasso's weirder works with heavy black lines and outer space. Also, Cézanne and Van Gogh's works are beautiful. I don't know if I really think about it anymore. I already thought about it so much that it is all just in there. Bernard Buffet made these brutal flower paintings I love. Isa Genzken’s roses, Grace Hartigan and Lichtenstein. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painted super vibrant flowers as does Judith Linhares. AG: That visual memory informs the automatic-ness on an unconscious level? EM: Basically, it’s all part of a mental Photoshop thing at this point. AG: Maybe this is a little off-topic, but I was also thinking about this French painter from the 18th century: Anne Vallayer-Coster. Her flower paintings are amazing. The genre of still life was obviously tied up with gender politics because women artists were not allowed to be trained in the same way as their male counterparts. Academic training with access to a live nude model was a no-no. And even if there were a handful of top tier female genre painters, her floral landscapes stand out in that 18th century world. Her flowers are insane, and they have this abundance that I think your works have. Vallayer-Coster’s work seems to treat abundance and joy as her prime subject. And of course, the history of the still life or all of vegetal motifs over the course of art history have always carried charged or coded meanings. In Van Eyck's paintings, the seventy-odd flowers and plants in the "Ghent Altarpiece," for example, each had specific symbolic meanings! Sadly, I feel like over the course of the late 2Oth century, the viability of joy and abundance as a “valid” subject was destroyed or outmoded. Do you connect with the subject of joy through these paintings? EM: Definitely. That is what I was trying to get at before when I was saying they are just flowers. It is a really enjoyable thing for me to paint. I don't feel the need to inject any kind of justification or deeper meaning into these paintings. It is such a basic and generic subject matter that allows me to have a lot of fun with it. I do get a lot of joy out of it actually. You can be really feminine with them, and there is obviously a lot of history with the sexuality of flowers: Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois. I paint these mushrooms that look like dicks all the time, and they are also in there. You can be humorous with them and they are easy. I don't think I'd have to think about them at all. As I am making them, the question is whether I like the way they look or not. It is really that matter of fact, which I enjoy. That brings me joy. Eddie Martinez (b. 1977, Groton Naval Base, CT) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Martinez’s unconventional practice has received growing institutional support, with five museum solo shows in the last three years, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai in 2019, a show of new sculptures and paintings at the Bronx Museum in 2018, an exhibition that featured a rotating display of his recent works on paper at the Drawing Center in 2017, and an exhibition at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, MA in 2017. His works are represented in international public collections including the Aurora Museum, Shanghai, China; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA; Hiscox Collection, London, UK; La Colección Júmex, Mexico City, Mexico; Marciano Collection, Los Angeles, CA; Morgan Library, New York, NY; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Saatchi Collection, London, UK; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China, among others. Alison M. Gingeras is a curator and writer based in New York and Warsaw.

In the late '60s and into the mid '70s, if there was a boxing match on TV my father and I watched it. Didn’t matter who was going at it, from buzzy flyweights to lumbering heavyweights. We sat on the orange couch. He poured himself a giant glass of Gallo’s chablis on ice and I had a Mom’s Root Beer straight from the bottle. I felt like a badass. And he would teach me how to read what happened in the ring. He saw it all as art. My father had been a boxer in the Navy. His close friend and fellow boxer once told him that he had been knocked out but miraculously stayed on his feet. He only later realized he had fought through a round and then into another, unconscious and on automatic, doing what he was trained to do which now came naturally, going through the motions, until he came back into himself, back in the fight. He was there, he was not there. It was 1973 when I was 12 that Pops started taking me to the Olympic Auditorium on Friday nights to see the fights. This experience was far from watching at home on television. In the crowd it was always dark in there, it seemed like everyone was either smoking a cigarette or a cigar, the voices could be loud, quiet violence in the air. But the focus was on the one place that was lit. The ring. Bright white lights flooded the canvas. Here a ritual played out. I once witnessed a myth. Such a ceremony. The boxers came toward the ring like shapes moving in the distance toward that square of light. Then ascending up and in between the ropes and entering that place of action in robes that often touched the ground. In a moment those robes came off, the men nearly naked, exposed, intimate. Hammer hitting a bell to start match. Such a clear simple piercing line that I could hear it and see it. Pops made the abstract clear. He would explain that the chaos was controlled, that you often had to get hit to hit, that this was the only pure sport. Raw. If you look long enough patterns emerge. You can see how boxers use the defined canvas to cut off and control the edges or dominate the middle. Action can happen anywhere within that ground. You see how every boxer has a different way of dancing jabbing cutting striking. Everything in motion, legs moving and arms working from the tight quick jab to the wild roundhouse and everything in between. Their process played out before us. Often red blood would fly, the inside splashed out. Style defining authorship. Winning and losing in real time. I was lost in it and I loved it. Still do but in a different way, now, here. —Jeff Poe

Blum & Poe is pleased to present "Sacrificial Love," an exhibition of new paintings and a bronze sculpture by Copenhagen-based artist Alexander Tovborg. This marks Tovborg’s third solo presentation with Blum & Poe. In his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and performances, Tovborg approaches spirituality and mythology as crucial components of the human experience. Aiming to reconstruct history, his work invites us to redefine humankind’s position in relation to the hierarchies and power structures inherent to these oral and written narratives. Characterized by speculative and fictional tale-telling, these works come to life as a visualization of a new alphabet through fragmented and poetic imagery. Focusing on subplots of Western religions and European folk traditions in which the artist is rooted, his works are a hybrid of fantasy and raw abstraction, staging dreamlike sceneries featuring biomorphic forms. Tovborg’s past bodies of work, such as "The Knight of Faith," finding its central theme in the myth of Noah’s Ark, "The Rape of Europha," a meditation on Europe’s current political crises, and "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," an overarching parable of good versus evil, all come together to tell a delicately layered story, which has often been excluded from historical accounts. In his new series "Sacrificial Love," Tovborg continues his critical approach towards grand religious narratives, and reconstructs them through a personal and intimate story—the pregnancy of his partner, cellist Cæcilie Trier. Born on the feast day of Saint Cecilia, who symbolizes the central role of music in the liturgy, Trier is portrayed as this most famous virgin martyr of the early church in Tovborg’s recent works. The paintings and the bronze sculpture in the show are imbued with Christian symbolism: evil dragons, lilies for divine sacrifice, and the seduction of Eve by the serpent. Tovborg reclaims the mythological chain of power in these narratives by manipulating the characters, depicting the Virgin Mary with a daughter, or speculating about a new mythical creature that is half-human and half-scorpion, echoing Trier’s zodiac. With feathers and halos around her figure Cæcilie becomes part of nature and the cosmos, challenging the man-made linear history suggesting one that is cyclical and holistic. The artist’s choice of household materials, such as cleaning cloths or bedlinens, as his primary painting surface further aims to problematize the portrayal of women as domestic workers throughout history. Tovborg’s works draw a mystical circle in the exhibition space—one that is beyond time and space, initiating from the cycle of motherhood and eventually leading to an existential awareness that is both sensual and poetic. Alexander Tovborg (b. 1983, Copenhagen, Denmark) received his BA from Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Karlsruhe, Germany and his MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark. Tovborg’s work has been the subject of international solo exhibitions including "The Deity and its Creators," Rudolph Tegner Museum & Statue Park, Dronningmølle, Denmark (2019); "Knight of Faith," GL STRAND, Copenhagen, Denmark (2016); "The Rape of Europha," State of Concept, Athens, Greece (2016); "Bocca Baciata," Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark (2014); "Teenage Jesus," Hospitalhof, Stuttgart, Germany (2012); and Tre, Museet for Religiøs Kunst, Lemvig, Denmark (2011). Selections of his oeuvre have been featured in institutional group exhibitions including at Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2020); the 9th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Gothenburg, Sweden (2017); Museet for Religiøs Kunst, Lemvig, Denmark (2016); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2013); and the Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Mexico City, Mexico (2012). At Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA in 2015, Tovborg's work was included in "The Avant-Garde Won't Give Up: Cobra and Its Legacy," a rereading of the Cobra postwar movement, curated by Alison M. Gingeras. Tovborg's work is permanently installed in various public Danish institutions and was recently acquired by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Japanese-Brazilian artist Asuka Anastacia Ogawa. This is the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery, following her debut at Blum & Poe Tokyo in 2020. Asuka Anastacia Ogawa’s large figurative paintings feature children engaged in reverie and play, in scenes that are both autobiographical and dream-spun. With large almond-shaped eyes, these subjects look out of the canvas with mysterious radiance and wisdom. Full of cryptic symbols from mirrors to garlic bulbs, Ogawa’s paintings are marked by references to the artist’s Japanese and Afro-Brazilian ancestral lineage. Born in Tokyo, Ogawa moved to Petrópolis, Brazil when she was three, attended high school in Sweden, and then studied at Central Saint Martins in London. Her peripatetic upbringing and identity are asserted in her paintings through imagery that is outside of time and place. Employing a minimal palette, she uses saturated yellows, pinks, and blues, to convey an elemental visual poetry. Her paintings are open to interpretation, as she notes, inviting viewers to create their own complementary stories. Ogawa’s works spark a journey through hereditary dreams that exist in the collective consciousness. In one picture, a child is portrayed kneeling on the ground with their hands concealed in a large, tangerine-hued bowl, as if caught in a domestic ritual. Two guardian-like figures dressed in white hold a pastel-pink banner over the child in a heraldic gesture of protection. Another painting features a figure brandishing a bird toy in one hand, and a basket full of reeds in another, cushioning two children from a shadowy character on horseback. In response to the prompt, “Where is home?” Ogawa replies, “I think about the people I love when I think of the word ‘home’—having time to explore, and a place to paint, is when I feel most at home.” The works in the exhibition are both a meditation on interconnectedness and belonging, and an offering of sanctuary from and within a world in flux. Asuka Anastacia Ogawa (b. 1988, Tokyo, Japan) received her BFA from Central Saint Martins, London, UK. After having her first solo show at Henry Taylor’s studio in Los Angeles in 2017, she had a solo show at Blum & Poe Tokyo in 2020, and was featured in the group exhibition “5,471 miles” at Blum & Poe Los Angeles in 2020. Her work is in the collection of X Museum, Beijing, China. She is currently based in New York and Los Angeles.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present “Loose Screw,” an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Anna Weyant. This show marks Weyant’s first solo presentation with Blum & Poe. Anna Weyant’s figurative paintings and still lifes bring to mind childhood bedtime stories and nursery rhymes. Both familiar and ominous, Weyant's versions of these stories feature young female characters trapped in tragicomic narratives. Their stories take unexpected twists at each turn, illustrating complex personalities and attitudes, and an awareness of life's irony. With round and prominent faces, Weyant’s characters echo the mischievous dolls of the famed Madeline children’s book series, featuring girls in a Catholic boarding school in Paris. Often autobiographical, Weyant’s characters are amusing and endearing, though simultaneously moody and dark. Weyant’s palette prioritizes dark greens and yellows, neutral hues that highlight juxtapositions of humor and solemnity, rebellion and repression. Once an idea emerges, Weyant sketches it on paper in different combinations before settling on a scenario, which she then stage-designs with dolls. Her elaborate and meticulous process culminates in rendering the dramatically lit scenes onto canvas. She references an eclectic range of art historical influences, from seventeenth-century Dutch painters like Gerrit van Honthorst to contemporary artists Lisa Yuskavage and Will Cotton, and pop culture references such as New Yorker cartoons, Bugs Bunny, and the Grinch. Presenting paintings made in 2020 and 2021, “Loose Screw” is also a meditation on the current state of humanity during the pandemic, dealing with complicated emotions such as fear, desperation, isolation, ignorance, and aggression. Giving its title to the show, one of the central works “Loose Screw” (2020), inspired by Otto Dix’s painting “Woman With A Red Hat” (1921) and Ellen Berkenblit’s portraits, depicts a woman seated at a bar, looking lonely and unhinged. Fascinated with Dix’s depiction of a column emerging from a dark void in the painting’s background, Weyant incorporates it into her own composition, approaching the column as a humorous stand-in for another figure—a reflection on what dialogue looks like in the age of self-isolation. One still life features a slice of bread stuck with a butter knife, a basket of eggs, and dead fish, eyes open, presented on a silver platter; another, a bouquet of white roses, the flowers cut from the stems. Her characters—some presented upside down, others mouth open, appearing to fall down from a wooden staircase, with spilling breasts—accompany these still lifes to tell an eerie and unsettling story in fragmented vignettes. If followed carefully, these scenes come together to form a magical realist narrative. “Loose Screw” invites viewers to a therapy session, a look at episodes and memories from childhood—an exorcism of thoughts and experiences at emotional heights. Anna Weyant (b. 1995, Calgary, Canada) received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. Weyant’s work was the subject of the solo exhibition “Welcome to the Dollhouse” at 56 Henry, New York, NY (2019). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions, including “Life Still,” C L E A R I N G, New York, NY (2020); “Sit Still,” Anna Zorina Gallery, New York, NY (2020); “Humanmakes,” Recharge Foundation, Singapore (2020); “Historicity,” Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2019); “Of Pursism,” Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami, FL (2018); and “Circles without Breaks,” Local Projects, Long Island City, NY (2017).

Blum & Poe is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by New York-based artist Paul Mogensen, following the recent announcement of the gallery’s co-representation of the artist with Karma. Presenting paintings dating back to the beginning of the artist’s career in the 1960s and recent works from the last decade, the exhibition also marks the artist’s first show in his hometown of Los Angeles in over forty years. Based on essential numerical sequences and ratios, Mogensen creates esoteric compositions that invite the viewer to make sense of the planar space. First conceiving a system and utilizing a mathematical formula, he allows the progression to dictate the composition. Mogensen prefers not to date or title his paintings—while this can be read as a gesture foregrounding the timelessness of his work, it also underlines the necessity for a non-linear narrative in art history. Avoiding both metaphorical and conceptualist language, he rejects most canonical terminology—including “minimalism” and “abstraction.” Largely shaped by his education focusing on mathematics and art at the University of Southern California, Mogensen’s practice reflects his wide interests ranging from fourteenth century Sienese painting to Russian constructivists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Vladimir Tatlin. Building upon the beauty of simplicity, Mogensen’s works are gracefully concise and yet yield complex and intense visual experiences—similar to an elegant mathematical formula. His earliest paintings from the ‘60s epitomize his interest in reduction. Stacked vertically, these modular, multi-panel works are made of rectangles that gradually increase in size, and utilize negative space through exacting processes. These monochrome compositions vibrate with saturated pigments—paint he applies straight out of the tube, rejecting any mixture. The pursuit of reduction is a large and compelling part of his practice, seen in his use of pure chemical pigmentation and numerical sequencing alike. Various visual relationships—between color and form, canvas and the wall—give way to a visual illusion blending the painterly with the architectural. As longtime friend artist Lynda Benglis points out: “Paul’s painting challenged both the wall and the floor space, literally breaking up the surface of the wall. This mocking of the wall was a totally new idea.” Highlighting the kinship between the works and the architectural space, one of the multi-panel works guided by the golden ratio is exhibited in the downstairs gallery constructed using the same perfect mathematical formula—with each room reducing in size in accordance with the golden section. Continuing this application of mathematical and architectural processes onto a single canvas in his most recent works, Mogensen utilizes the N + 1 progression pattern to grow and propagate the square shape. Traveling around the edge, the squares migrate towards the center, creating a spiral form. The oscillation between colors and forms implies a fugal complexity, as the human brain tends to seek out and complete a pattern that might not initially be there. The use of sharp contrast in colors—deep cadmium red on black, ultramarine blue on hot pink—adds additional dimension to the single-layered surface. Isolating color, line, form, and light, Mogensen creates a pathway for the eyes to move along the edge of the canvas. Different from figurative artworks in which human faces automatically activate neural systems, geometric abstractions require active thought. This show is an invitation for deep and silent observation in an age of digital stimuli excess, providing a sanctuary for busy minds. Paul Mogensen (b. Los Angeles, 1941) lives and works in New York. He attended the University of Southern California. In 2019 the artist received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art, and his work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX and Karma, New York, NY, and was featured in a group exhibition at the Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria. Mogensen’s work is represented in the collections of major museums in the U.S. and abroad, including: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Harvard Art Museums/ Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; New York Public Library, New York, NY; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present a solo exhibition of never before exhibited works on paper by the late artist Robert Colescott. Presenting two series respectively dating back to 1979 and 1980, the exhibition showcases the artist’s well-established satirical and critical approach to cultural clichés, racial stereotypes, and tropes of beauty and the gaze. By the mid-1970s, Colescott had created the works with which he achieved a national reputation. These paintings used the tools of parody and appropriation to remake art historical masterpieces, while satirizing and deconstructing pervasive racist attitudes. In 1979, Colescott created a series of drawings that satirized art history itself. Art history as an academic discipline came into being during the nineteenth century, and the earliest professional art historians viewed their primary task as similar to that of their colleagues in the academy, the natural scientists. Classification was the order of the day. Aesthetics gave way to taxonomy, to a certain extent. Art history became a history of movements, and artists became something less than individuals. The tendency of scholars and art historians to categorize artists only intensified during the twentieth century, which meant that any beginning student of art history would be taught that it is a procession of movements leading logically from one to the next, in an inevitable flow of progress. For an uncompromising individualist like Colescott, the reduction of art to broad categories or “isms” presented him with an irresistible target for satire. The first of the twenty works of this Art History series on view at Blum & Poe Los Angeles, "ROBERT'S complete HiSTORY of WORLD ART" (1979), announces that these drawings present his personal, idiosyncratic version of the subject at hand. These works are gently mocking rather than savagely critical, and injected with a vaudeville flavor. The first four drawings represent early art historical periods, and each is portrayed by a statuesque woman wearing sexy lingerie and smoking a cigarette. These drawings are loaded with references—one symbolizing Egyptian art which had a decisive influence on the artist due to his time in Cairo in the mid-1960s; another represents Rome, borrowing the figure’s pose from a famous ancient sculpture representing the death of a Trojan priest, Laocoön. Another, a parody of a medieval illuminated manuscript, turns the Christian ethos of asceticism and denial on its head by depicting naked figures engaging in various sexual activities. The second series on view, The Girls of the Golden West, was created a year after the Art History drawings in 1980. Colescott had returned to the Bay Area in 1970 after having lived elsewhere for almost two decades, and it was during this time that the artist began a voyage into his past. Colescott takes on the social conditioning of the American ‘30s and ‘40s, exploring his own exposure to popular culture especially through advertisements. Colescott riffs on the sexually suggestive cowgirl persona employed in the commercial imagery of his youth—seductive, nostalgic illusions that insinuated one could still partake of the adventures of the frontier. Employing the narrative devices often found in his paintings such as the dream sequence, the cut-away, and the montage, Colescott depicts each state of the West with a version of this cowgirl motif, parsing the reality of the American dream. Most of the drawings in this series come across as a theatrical experience, as their protagonists act out various scenarios typical of old Westerns. One cowgirl personifying the state of Colorado wears a breathing device as she is about to descend into a mine. Another woman representing the Dakota territory is an ominous vision clad entirely in leather, while the figure representing the state of Wyoming is a mirage of sky and clouds in female form. At the end of a typical Western film, the hero rides off into the sunset, but perhaps in this case, she simply dissolves into the sky. With gratitude to Matthew Weseley, independent art historian and co-curator of the traveling retrospective exhibition "Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott," who generously contributed original research and scholarship on these two bodies of work, vital to this exhibition and its correlating press release. Robert Colescott (b. 1925, Oakland, CA; d. 2009, Tucson, AZ) was honored as the first African American artist to represent the United States with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1997. His work is currently the subject of a traveling retrospective curated by Lowery Stokes Sims and Matthew Weseley that began at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH in 2019; traveling to Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, FL; and Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL;accompanied by a comprehensive monograph published by Rizzoli Electa. Colescott’s work is represented in public collections internationally, in such notable institutions as the Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH; American Research Center in Egypt, Alexandria, VA; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA; Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; New Museum, New York, NY; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; Pinault Collection, Paris, France; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; among many more.

Blum & Poe is pleased to present New Images of Man curated by Alison M. Gingeras. This exhibition revisits and expands upon the Museum of Modern Art’s eponymous 1959 group exhibition curated by Peter Selz that brought together artists whose work grappled with the human condition as well as emerging modes of humanist representation in painting and sculpture in the wake of the traumatic fallout of the Second World War. Some sixty years have passed since New Images of Man presented key figures of the European neo avant-garde such as Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, César, Francis Bacon, and Karel Appel alongside the ascendant figures of the American art scene such as Willem de Kooning, H.C. Westermann, and Leon Golub. Set against the backdrop of existentialist philosophy and the socio-political anxieties of the postwar period, the esteemed humanist philosopher Paul Tillich wrote of these artists in the original MoMA catalogue, “Each period has its peculiar image of man. It appears in its poems and novels, music, philosophy, plays and dances; and it appears in its painting and sculpture. Whenever a new period is conceived in the womb of the preceding period, a new image of man pushes towards the surface and finally breaks through to find its artists and philosophers.” Part homage, part radical revision, this two-floor presentation reconstitutes emblematic figures from the original MoMA line up of artists while simultaneously expanding outwards to include those of the same generation and period who were overlooked in the midcentury. This reprisal features forty-three artists hailing not only from the US and Western Europe, but also Cuba, Egypt, Haiti, India, Iran, Japan, Poland, Senegal, and Sudan. The overwhelming maleness of the original New Images of Man has been amended by foregrounding previously excluded women artists from the same generation. Had gender politics of the 1950s been less misogynist, Selz might have considered artists such as Alina Szapocznikow, Niki de Saint Phalle, Yuki Katsura, Carol Rama, and Lee Lozano. With the benefit of inclusive hindsight, Gingeras strives to present a fuller range of this humanist struggle, thus more acutely enacting the original curator’s vision to gather a range of “effigies of the disquiet man.” As the capstone to this historical proposition, the exhibition argues for the contemporary resonance of this midcentury disquiet by judiciously including a selection of contemporary artists. These living artists are also “imagists that take the human situation, indeed the human predicament” as their primary subject, while also reflecting the legacy of the aesthetic concerns from the original period. Spanning painting and sculpture, this contemporary component includes works by Paweł Althamer, Cecily Brown, Luis Flores, Michel Nedjar, Greer Lankton, Miriam Cahn, Sarah Lucas, Dana Schutz, El Hadji Sy, Ahmed Morsi, Henry Taylor, amongst others. Installed alongside these paintings and sculptures, historic and contemporary, are interventions that evoke the larger-than-life figures from the original show—de Kooning, Dubuffet, Bacon, Giacometti, Westermann. Playful tributes to these masters appear throughout the exhibition, including two wall murals by Los Angeles artist Dave Muller. Embedded at the center of this revisionist enterprise is another historical MoMA exhibition also founded upon postwar humanism—this time through the lens of photography. The 1955 exhibition Family of Man curated by Edward Steichen—the legendary director of the Photography Department at MoMA—was conceived four years before Peter Selz’s New Images of Man, and was devised as a celebration of the camera as a powerful, immersive tool for the promulgation of images as well as the affirmation of the universal human experience. While it debuted in New York in 1955, Family of Man went on a veritable world tour. According to Steichen’s 1963 memoir A Life in Photography, between 1955 and 1962 about nine million viewers all around the world had the opportunity “to see themselves reflected” in the 503 photographs of people, making it the most popular photography exhibition ever. As the legacy of Steichen’s curatorial endeavors lives on in contemporary visual culture, this section of the exhibition sets out to challenge the Western-centric bias of the original show. This reassessment of Steichen’s conceit focuses upon two women artists from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Polish, self-taught photographer Zofia Rydet was active in the mid-1950s yet she was separated from Steichen not only by the Iron Curtain. This redux presentation of Rydet’s photographic oeuvre suggests a more complex vision of postwar era humanist photography. In fact, after seeing Steichen’s Family of Man show in Warsaw, Rydet embarked upon her series of documentary images of children in the literal rubble of the Second World War in the early 1960s entitled Mały człowiek (Little Man). This presentation features a selection of Rydet’s photographs from her documentary series called the “Sociological Record” in which she captured thousands of ordinary households in Poland from 1978 until her death in 1997. Rydet’s reworking of the Steichen paradigm finds a jarring echo in the contemporary oeuvre of Deana Lawson—an artist whose intimate, yet iconic imagery immortalizes African-American family life. Lawson grew up in Rochester, New York, the birthplace of Kodak—her involvement with photography is deeply bound up with her family’s history and their entwinement with the photographic industry. Unlike Rydet, Lawson’s images are often staged while they strive to capture the magic and textures of everyday struggles, emotions, and plain existence. Her gaze intrepidly focuses upon members of the African diaspora while also crafting stunning formal compositions that hark back to classical painting. As Lawson has said of her work, “I have an image in mind that I have to make. It burns so deeply that I have to make it.” Shown side by side in a scenography that references Steichen’s original Family of Man presentation at MoMA, Rydet’s communist-era documentation of Polish families in their humble interiors resonates uncannily with Lawson’s present-day portraiture. Despite being decades apart, culturally disparate, and approaching their medium with radically differing methods, both Rydet and Lawson create images that offer a sharp rebuttal to Steichen’s sentimental and melodramatic original opus. Both photographers share a quality that Lawson has articulated when speaking of her own work, creating images that are “thick with space, layered with otherness and belonging at the same time.” Together Rydet and Lawson provide a revisionist twist to this new Family of Man. This section of the show was curated in collaboration with Antonina Gugała with a new installation by Deana Lawson made especially for the show. While much has changed in social and political terms since the 1950s, we are arguably again in a period of immense existential questioning and profound collective anxiety—artists now, as then, are on the frontlines of confronting what it means to be human, therefore making New Images of Man a subject still urgent for contemplation and provocation. This past summer, Selz died at the age of one hundred. In his New York Times obituary, his daughter Gabrielle remarked, “He would say that everything—a somber painting by Rothko or a Rodin sculpture—was about the human condition. My dad responded to emotion.” Arguably, emotion is the gravitational force that draws us to images of other people—from prehistoric cave paintings to press photographs of detained refugees and children on the Mexican-American border, humans find empathetic connection, solace, or simple recognition in the act of contemplating depictions of other humans. In the spirit of Selz’s original aim, this restaging of New Images of Man and reimagining of Family of Man resolves to recontextualize artists’ agency in addressing the fundamental questions of the human condition and to discourage apathy about our fellow humans’ plight. While an art exhibition can only operate on a symbolic and discursive level, the impetus behind the new New Images of Man is to continue our collective rumination on the human condition with renewed emotional and intellectual urgency. By expanding the geopolitical and generational scope of artists, an expansive vision of humanity starts to emerge—broadening “man” to a more intersectional vision of human existence.