Los Angeles-based gallery Blum and Poe is set to open shop in New York — but it won’t just be another “big box situation,” according to Tim Blum. Unlike its sprawling 21,000-square-foot “mothership” space in L.A., this one will be a more focused affair.
“I’m not simply trying to carry the whole program into another city,” he said. “It will be something a little more mannered, thoughtful, and methodical.” He describes the opening, along with his soon-to-open Tokyo gallery, as a more organic extension of the L.A. program, “a couple of arms extending off this body, one to Asia, and one to the East Coast.”
While he wouldn’t go into specifics about the soon-to-open New York space, he did say that news about it was imminent. In June, he told the Art Newspaper that he was looking for townhouse with a “good parlour floor” for exhibitions, and news about his preference for the Upper East Side has been percolating. “One of the reasons we wanted to go there,” he said about the Upper East Side, “is because of the history and the general seriousness of the neighborhood.”
Blum and Poe New York will focus for the most part on its post-war Japanese program, beginning with the Mono-ha group, which the gallery featured in its biggest exhibition to date in L.A. last year “Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha.” “There’s another major post-war exhibition that we’re doing late next year, so aspects of that will also come into play,” he said.
The gallery has a number of Japanese artists on their roster. Quite a few, like those with the Mono-ha movement including Nobuo Sekine, Kishio Suga, Susumu Koshimizu, and Kōji Enokura are lesser known in the States, and have no representation in New York, despite having been responsible for transforming Japanese art in the '60s and '70s.
Still, many other of Blum and Poe’s artists already have good representation in New York. Yoshitomo Nara is with Pace, Sharon Lockhart is with Gladstone Gallery, and Takashi Murakami is with Gagosian and Emanuel Perrotin, another new addition to the New York landscape. How will that play out?
“There are really no rules,” said Blum. “But there’s a kind of ethical code, especially amongst those who work closely together. We’ve got plenty of work to do with artists who are not represented there. So that’s been the gist of it and the thing that’s catapulted it into being.”
With artists who are already represented in New York, this will mean specific projects (“say, if it’s a painter, then maybe a show of drawings, not of paintings,” said Blum), and historical shows. He also foresees the possibility of teaming up with another gallery for a collaborative show if there's an aspect of the artist's practice that needs more space or to augment an exhibition. Last year he partnered with Gladstone, which presented “Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha” after it closed at Blum & Poe. “That’s the best scenario,” he said.
But he won’t be asking his artists to transfer their allegiances to Blum and Poe exclusively. “We’re not of the mindset, the Hauser & Wirth mentality, where it’s all or nothing. Their artists have to go all in. Or, nothing. This is an attitude that we’re not interested in.”
