Blum & Poe celebrated three new exhibitions on July 1, 2023. Solo shows include: Nightswimming by Christopher Hartmann, A NI EE (I AM HERE) by Acaye Kerunen, and The Distances by Matt Saunders. All the exhibitions will remain on view through August 12, 2023.
Nightswimming by Christopher Hartmann
Nightswimming is London-based artist Christopher Hartmann’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The artist’s paintings portray situations that are seemingly detached from specific time and space. These settings often imply physical interaction or dialogue but are imbued with conflicting moods of intimacy and alienation. These indistinct yet persistent feelings of unease are latent to our oversaturated media landscape, and technology-mediated social connections. The construction of the painting itself also mimics the layering processes of photo-editing software. Therefore the visual includes the built-up application of artificial color tones recalling the alienating luminosity of digital screens.
This exhibition focuses on Hartmann’s interest in abstraction, beginning with a series of beds that appear to have just been left. These works evoke the vulnerability of sleep, the ambiguities of dream states, as well as the intimacy of physical relationships. Loaded with a heightened sense of emotion and reality, they inhabit a liminal space between fact and fiction, the reality of the present and memory of the past. The bed paintings are presented in dialogue with two seascapes. The myriad folds in the bedsheets mirror in the infinite ripples on the water’s surface, intimating different states of immersion—the consciousness suspended during sleep and the body suspended in water.
Christopher Hartmann, A place to call home, 2023, oil on linen, © Christopher Hartmann, Photo: Deniz Guzel
A NI EE (I AM HERE) byAcaye Kerunen
A NI EE (I AM HERE) features the art of Ugandan artist Acaye Kerunen. This is her debut solo exhibition with the gallery, as well as her first solo presentation in the United States. This exhibition premiere follows Kerunen’s acclaimed showcase in Uganda’s inaugural national pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy in 2022, which received the biennale jury Special Mention award for best national participation.
The Distances by Matt Saunders
Also opening, The Distances by American artist Matt Saunders. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery as well as his first in Los Angeles since 2014. Exploring the open border between painting and photography, The Distances sees Saunders delving further into his ongoing study of liminal spaces in the dividing lines that dictate visual art’s medium specificities. In pointing to the limitations of these categorical barriers, the artist engages with other observed dichotomies—proximity versus distance, immediacy versus mediation, or gaze versus counter gaze. Additionally, painterly gestures atop the photographic surface evoke touch and contact while vacillating between convergence and divergence with the image below.
On view: July 1, 2023 – August 12, 2023
What: New Exhibitions
Where: Blum & Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd., LA, 90034
When: Running through August 12, 2023
Website: https://www.blumandpoe.com/
