Blum will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary with "Thirty Years: Written with a Splash of Blood," a milestone exhibition installed across its three locations- Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York. Co-curated by Tim Blum and postwar Japanese art historian Mika Yoshitake, this presentation is an inter-generational and cross-disciplinary survey of Japanese art from the 1960s to today. The title is a line from Nobel Prize-nominated author Yukio Mishima's Runaway Horses, a celebrated novel that touches on themes of national identity, self-actualization, and the power of reincarnation. 

This exhibition reflects on Blum’s first trip to Japan forty years ago, which catalyzed the gallery’s groundbreaking work with Japanese and international artists including foundational exhibitions of artists Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami, the acclaimed 2012 survey "Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha," as well as "Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s" in 2019. This show will feature work by key artists from Gutai, Mono-ha, and Superflat movements through today, traversing the decades from the immediate aftermath of postwar Japan, onward.

[Image: Kishio Suga (1976) Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art]

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BLUM represents more than sixty artists and estates from sixteen countries worldwide, nurturing a diverse roster of artists at all stages of their practices with a range of global perspectives. Originally opened as Blum & Poe in Santa Monica in 1994, the gallery has been a pioneer in its early commitment to Los Angeles as an international arts capital. 

The gallery has been acclaimed for its groundbreaking work in championing artists of Japanese and Korean postwar and contemporary movements, such as Dansaekhwa, Mono-ha, and Superflat, and for organizing museum-caliber solo presentations and historical survey exhibitions across its spaces in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and New York. Often partnering with celebrated curators and scholars such as Cecilia Alemani, Alison M. Gingeras, Sofia Gotti, Joan Kee, and Mika Yoshitake, the gallery has produced large-scale projects critically examining historical movements and work including the Japanese Mono-ha school (2012); the Korean Dansaekhwa monochrome painters (2014); the European postwar movement CoBrA (2015); Japanese art of the 1980s and 1990s (2019); a rereading of Brazilian Modernism (2019); a revisionist take on the 1959 MoMA exhibition, New Images of Man (2020); and a survey of portraiture through a democratic and humanist lens (2023).

BLUM’s wide-reaching program includes exhibitions, lectures, performance series, screenings, video series, and an annual art book fair at its base in Los Angeles. BLUM Books, the gallery’s publishing division, democratically circulates its program through original scholarship and accessible media ranging from academic monographs, audio series, magazines, to artists’ books.  Across the three global locations, BLUM prioritizes environmental and community stewardship in all operations. In 2015, it was certified as an Arts:Earth Partnership (AEP) green art gallery in Los Angeles and consequently became one of the first green certified galleries in the United States. The gallery is also a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, which works to facilitate a more sustainable commercial art world and reduce the industry’s collective carbon footprint. BLUM is committed to fostering inclusive and equitable communities both in its physical and online spaces and believes that everybody should have equal access to creating and engaging with contemporary art.

Thirty Years: Written with a Splash of Blood

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