The founders of Blum & Poe, a market heavyweight based in Los Angeles, are splitting up after nearly 30 years running the gallery together.
Jeff Poe is set to depart the gallery after founding it with Tim Blum in 1994, leaving the latter in charge of the business. Despite Poe’s departure, the gallery will continue to retain its name.
Matt Bangser, a partner who formerly oversaw the gallery’s New York outpost, has now been promoted to managing partner.
Poe’s reasons for his departure were not immediately clear. In a statement, he said, “I’ll be going down a simpler and more fluid path. I’ll continue to work with artists and art; I have to, it’s given me great joy and nothing is more important to me. I’ve also always been engaged with building quieter aspects of the gallery—developing real estate, working with architecture, design—and I’ll continue with that too. I’m pretty excited about having the freedom to fully embrace a new practice.”
When Blum and Poe founded the gallery, the Los Angeles art scene was significantly smaller than it is now. “There was no art world, per se,” Poe told Artnet News in 2020, speaking of that city’s network of galleries.
In the years since, Blum & Poe has emerged as one of Los Angeles’s more blue-chip enterprises, representing artists like Mark Grotjahn, Yoshitomo Nara, and Henry Taylor. The gallery has also grown in scale, opening spaces in New York and Tokyo, and also expanding its LA presence.
“It’s been an extraordinary journey building this gallery with Jeff,” Blum said in a statement. “Starting out in Los Angeles in 1994 with a paltry sum of money and a 1200-square-foot space and taking the gallery through this explosive global growth within the art world is nothing short of remarkable. I see this moment as yet another inflection point in this history, and I am emboldened by the strength of our team now spanning Taipei, Tokyo, Los Angeles, New York, and Paris.”