After over 30 years in the art business, Tim Blum, who helped grow the careers of artists ranging from Yoshitomo Nara to Takashi Murakami, is stepping away from his gallery, which will no longer operate with a traditional gallery model, the dealer told ARTnews Tuesday.
Blum said that the decision was driven neither by financial strain nor a midlife reinvention, but by burnout. “This is not about the market,” he said. “This is about the system.”
He was referring to the whole architecture of contemporary gallery life: the ever-expanding web of fairs, openings, obligations, and expectations that he said have grown more demanding year after year.
“It’s not working. And it hasn’t been working,” he said. “Even when it looked like it was.”
The decision to sunset the gallery comes just about two years after another major shift: the end of Blum’s longtime partnership with Jeff Poe. The two co-founded Blum & Poe in Los Angeles in 1994, when the city’s art scene was still peripheral to New York’s dominance.
Over the next three decades, they helped transform it into a global force, representing artists like Yoshitomo Nara, Solange Pessoa, Takashi Murakami, and Henry Taylor, while expanding to New York and Tokyo. Poe stepped away in August 2023, citing a desire for a “simpler and more fluid path.” “It’s been an extraordinary journey,” he said at the time. “But I see this moment as yet another inflection point.” By October, Blum had removed his former partner’s name from the masthead.
Blum’s Tokyo and Los Angeles locations will close following their summer exhibitions. A New York space expected to open in Tribeca in the fall may not open at all—if it does it won’t be as a traditional gallery— and Blum will not maintain a formal artist roster going forward.
Instead, Blum said, he’s pursuing “a more flexible model,” one that will involve special projects, collaborations, and what he described as “longer-term visions still in development.”
While the gallery will sunset, Blum won’t disappear from the market. “Of course I’ll still be buying and selling art,” he said. “It’s part of my DNA.”
This shift has been building for years, Blum said, though he pointed to the period after the 2008 crash as the inflection point. “Since 2009, everything’s moved upward and outward,” he said. “And we’ve been very involved in that expansion.” More fairs, more locations, more shows, more artists—growth as a kind of default setting. But even in the most robust years—like 2021, when the market was frothier—it didn’t feel sustainable. “The business just got more and more arduous, more aggravating,” he said.
And yet the response across the industry was always the same: keep going. “It’s like a friend of mine used to say, you’re banging on the lawnmower to fix the hot water heater,” Blum said. In his estimation, the system was misaligned, and everyone knew it—but they kept doing the same thing, hoping for a different result. Even now, years after the pandemic briefly forced a pause, many dealers are back on the same circuit, moving faster than ever.
“Everybody talks about wanting to step off,” Blum said. “But nothing ever really changes.”
After decades spent navigating what he calls “the world of big money and big business,” he’s looking for something else with a slower rhythm, a different purpose. “I don’t want finance and logistics to be the foregrounded notion in my headspace every day.” What he’s after instead is a life in the market that allows for reflection, relationships, and other modes of engagement with art that aren’t purely transactional.
One emerging focus is a long-simmering project that he and his wife have been quietly developing for years—something Blum describes as a space for “slower engagement.” The emphasis is on healing, intentionality, and consciousness. He sees this as a way to reconnect art to context, meaning, and self-examination. “It’s about building a bridge between different modalities,” he said. “Real-life transitions with art.”
The market has recently grown sluggish, but Blum was adamant that the idea of winding down operations had been percolating for years. “This isn’t because Basel sucked,” he said. “But it did suck. It was like a thunderclap—confirmation of everything I’ve been feeling for years.” He said he sold 85 percent of his booth in advance, but the fair seemed to confirm his need to do things differently. “We didn’t have a single meaningful conversation Thursday through Sunday,” he said. “It was profound.”
Blum was specific about the fact that he will not become an adviser or start a consultancy firm, but he said it was time for a change. “Everyone talks about wanting to step off the merry-go-round,” he said. “But nobody ever does. I’ve decided I need to.”
