The Art Newspaper

LA gallery expands to Japan

Blum & Poe is opening an office in Tokyo

By Charlotte Burns. Market, Issue 239, October 2012
Published online: 01 October 2012

Blum & Poe artist Susumu Koshimizu’s Paper (formerly Paper 2), 1969/2012

The Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe is launching its first international branch and will open an office in Tokyo in the coming months. “I’ve got a personal connection to the country, we work with artists there and it feels like the right time to do this,” says Tim Blum, the gallery’s co-founder, who previously lived in Japan.

Ashley Rawlings, a specialist in postwar and contemporary Japanese art and the former managing editor of ArtAsia­Pacific, will direct the Tokyo office.

Blum & Poe has several Japanese artists in its stable, from contemporary stars such as Takashi Murakami to historical groups such as Mono-ha.

Blum says that exhibitions such as “Tokyo 1950-70: a New Avant-Garde”, which is scheduled to open at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on 18 November (until 25 February) and “Gutai: Splendid Playground”, which is due to go on show at the Guggenheim in New York in 2013 (15 February-8 May) point to this being a “major moment for post-war Japanese art. There seems to be a real dialogue going on right now.”

As well as cementing relationships with primary artists, the new Tokyo office will aim to source secondary market material from major Japanese movements and major works by Western artists that were bought during the art boom in the 1990s and are now “hiding in collections all across Japan,” Blum says.