BLUM is pleased to present NAKED, an exhibition of new paintings by Tokyo-based artist Tomoo Gokita. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Known for his uncanny approach to figuration, Gokita has long explored the tension between familiarity and distortion in his psychologically charged compositions. Working in both monochrome and vibrant colors, he has built a distinctive visual language that merges portraiture, abstraction, and cultural memory. Early works often originated from found imagery—vintage magazines and old newspapers—serving as visual springboards that he would intuitively warp and reimagine through his tactile process of painting. In recent years, however, Gokita has shifted his practice inward. No longer relying on pre-existing media, he channels his subjects from memory and subconscious invention. The resulting forms—part-human, part-fantastical—occupy a liminal space between reality and dream. His characters now take shape through layers of erasure and reinvention. This iterative approach allows each figure to exist as a collision of gestures, influences, and emotional states, invoking artists from Picasso to Guston while conjuring the spectral strangeness of sci-fi cinema and surrealist dreamscapes. With NAKED, Gokita turns his attention to the trope of the female nude, reframing a historically overdetermined subject with acidic irreverence and grotesque beauty. In these paintings, Surrealist bodies bristle with defiant physicality, eschewing objectification in favor of confrontational agency. Referencing the glamor of Playboy, the weirdness of B-movie aesthetics, and the compositional motifs of Impressionist painting, these nudes are saturated with intense, unsettling color. At once seductive and disquieting, titles such as PEEPING WOMAN (2025), THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB (2025), and THE BALCONY INCIDENT (2025) hint at uncanny and humorous narratives, infusing the work with irony, unease, and a self-assured rejection of conventional beauty. ____ BLUM is pleased to present Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Resisting a singular painting style—abstractions edging in on dreamy figuration—for his first exhibition at BLUM, Wilhelm Sasnal explores the iconography and visual lexicon of the roadways of Southern California. Painting from photographs and sketches, Sasnal captures imagery from a brief time spent living in Los Angeles as a cyclist—someone intimately familiar with the texture, palette, and imagery of the region's thoroughfares. The resulting body of work shares themes with film noir—examining the complexities of black as a lack of color; these vignettes are all at once dramatic, brooding, and exhilarating. After studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Sasnal set out to create paintings that undid the restrictive methodology associated with formal painting. Making work that was more about drawing with paint than painting and preferring graphic novels or record covers as his guidance over the Old Masters, Sasnal built his career around this idea of flipping painting on its head. This included bringing subjects rendered in black to the forefront of his compositions, thus reversing the guiding principles of chiaroscuro, a painting fundamental that harks back to the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Presently, Sasnal is an avid pupil of the art historical canon—taking inspiration from and pushing back against a wide array of sources, such as Edgar Degas and Sigmar Polke—but his enthusiasm for this discourse is still laced with a persistent contrarian spirit. Retaining a fixation on black as a pause for the eye in traditional compositions, Sasnal asserts stripes of black paint—a compositional rest—atop the busyness of landscapes rendered in pale color. In All American (2025), for instance, the work’s titular words float amid the desert horizon as if roads were paved in midair. Asphalt takes a paramount position in this exhibition, both for its physical characteristics and conceptual implications. Sasnal immerses himself in the many facets of this substance, becoming absorbed in it in the intimate way that only a cyclist could. When he conveys his findings, it is with the sensibilities of an artist who is keenly attuned to semiotics, color theory, depth, and perspective. For its external implications, Sasnal notes that asphalt is made of petrol, which gestures at a wealth of global issues. Asphalt also contains a complex spectrum of black, which Sasnal expresses through a range of gestures from snaking abstract lines to solid-edged blocks of pigment. Roads are also notable for their traditional usage in perspective, requiring only two receding lines and a horizon point to express depth. Sasnal paints in a medium-specific manner, but his mode of culling subject matter is multidisciplinary. Archiving and reflecting culture’s nuances back upon itself, in this exhibition, Sasnal took photographs, kept a sketching practice, and borrowed typeface while collecting notable moments or ideas for future paintings. The works Palmdale 1 and Palmdale 2 (both 2025), for instance, are painted from photographs that the artist took streetside while cycling. Noticing the presence of several fighter jets parked just within the parameters of a military base near Palmdale, California, the artist recorded this unexpected and ominous encounter with his camera. Later, when creating his compositions for each work, these massive weapons become abstracted, shadowy figures to convey and isolate the unique feeling imparted upon the viewer when seeing the original. With his brush to canvas acting as the lens through which these found talismans of our society are given meaning, Sasnal is not merely a documentarian but also a philosopher of the overlooked. Wilhelm Sasnal (b. 1972, Tarnów, Poland) studied architecture at the Kraków University of Technology (1992–1994) and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1994–1999). Recognized as one of Europe’s leading contemporary painters, Sasnal employs photographic imagery—from film stills and art reproductions to personal snapshots—as foundations for his paintings, subjecting them to abstraction, simplification, and distortion. His practice thoughtfully addresses historical themes such as the Holocaust, iconic pop-cultural imagery, and intimate scenes from everyday life, creating a complex reflection of post-Communist Poland amid ongoing socio-political shifts. ____ BLUM is pleased to present Unending Spiral, Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Rosalena’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This presentation coincides with the unveiling of Rosalena’s major public artwork commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this June, and the artist’s participation in exhibitions at the Dallas Contemporary and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She was recently featured in six exhibitions for the Getty’s PST ART: Art x Science Collide. Operating at the intersection of traditional craft and advancing technology, Rosalena’s work combines Wixárika weaving techniques, taught to her by her mother and grandmother, with technical processes such as ceramic 3D printing and digital weaving. Similar to computational language, weaving consists of a series of dualities—warp and weft, over and under—which behave similarly to the 0 and 1 binary of code. By giving form to this shared logic in her woven textiles and baskets, it is possible for Rosalena to physicalize and interrogate the technological scaffolding underneath. Unending Spiral examines the structural and conceptual implications of the spiral as both a formal strategy and a conceptual framework, drawing parallels between galactic formations and terrestrial craft traditions in textiles, coiled ceramics, and basketry. By employing materials of the earth—hand-dyed pine needles, clay, and fiber—Rosalena grounds her work in tactile, site-responsive processes while simultaneously engaging digital technologies with her hand. The pine needles are naturally dyed in plants such as cochineal, walnut, and onion skin, producing a living palette. These material disruptions interrogate the hierarchies that have historically positioned Indigenous craft in opposition to digital methodologies, proposing instead a continuum in which traditional knowledge and emerging technologies co-generate one another, revealing the spiral as a structure of persistence, recursion, and self-perpetuation. Using digital images of spirals in nature, such as spiral arms of galaxies—Rosalena translates these celestial bodies into handwoven patterns and coiled forms. Her 3D-printed ceramic vessels simulate the process of traditional coil building, yet they resist containment; partway through, the ceramic coils give way to handwoven pine needle basketry, a material intervention that disrupts technological precision with the irregularities of the organic. By positioning the spiral as a recursive, non-linear structure, Unending Spiral challenges dominant narratives of progress, which privilege forward motion and technological advancement over cyclical, regenerative knowledge systems, foregrounding craft as a site of critical resistance and epistemological expansion. Through these hybrid forms, Rosalena posits an alternative material cosmology—one that is iterative, interwoven, and perpetually in infinite motion. _____ BLUM is pleased to present LACMA Seeds and Weeds, Los Angeles-based artist Adam Silverman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Continuously finding new ways to address the idea of place through his mastery of the ceramic medium, Silverman has turned to the construction site of the forthcoming Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) building, designed by Peter Zumthor, for his latest source of inspiration. Collecting remnants such as tar, clay, and felled bamboo trees, the artist processes these tokens into the final constitution of each vessel. Receiving degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design in both Fine Arts and Architecture, the spatial and structural awareness of Silverman’s artistic output is palpable. As much about their own construction as their relationships to their surroundings, Silverman’s vessels are often presented as elements of a larger installation that also engages its environment—highly considered parts of a whole within a contingent context. After his studies, while doing a residency in ceramics in Mashiko, Japan—known for its rich ceramic tradition—Silverman observed and utilized the local clay that people from this region had been working with for centuries. Those familiar with the traditional vessels from Mashiko would recognize the distinctive style and finish that results, in part, from chemical reactions when firing the iron and silicic acid that naturally occurs in the ground there. It was in Japan that Silverman began examining the connections between pottery’s geological properties and place, but it wasn’t until later that he would begin exchanging geological indicators with cultural meaning in his process. It was while working on a site-specific installation for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, that Silverman first utilized materials excavated from a cultural site to build his vessels. Intrigued by the convergence of two of his favorite architects, with Renzo Piano’s addition to Louis Kahn’s original museum building, Silverman wanted to create something that encapsulated the physical overlap between these two great cultural forces. Similarly, Silverman saw the construction site of Zumthor’s LACMA building abutting the historically rich La Brea Tar Pits within the heart of the city as a distinct moment of institutional, architectural, biological, and geological relevance that could be preserved through the ceramic medium. LACMA Seeds and Weeds concretizes a transition for Los Angeles—wherein land that has acted as a gathering point, providing the city a glimpse into its prehistoric past, is peppered with unique properties as a new structure takes its place there. Utilizing materials from the construction zone as part of his medium to create the effect of his finished works, Silverman conceptually honors the many stages of the history of this place in his objects. Carefully searching the LACMA building’s dig site, Silverman found deposits of tar bubbling up from the ground alongside deposits of natural clay. Bringing these substances back to his studio, he processed them—using tools such as a mortar and pestle—into a specific mixture that he utilizes to create the finish of his “seed” and “weed” vessels presented here. As their name indicates, Silverman’s “seed” and “weed” vessels could almost have cropped up in their location, as that is what the ingredients of their makeup had done. It is Silverman whose expertise allows their specific existence—with a meticulous process that might include multiple firings, restricting airflow to the kiln, or blowing ash on vessels to achieve each work’s unique finish. It is through a combination of what the LACMA site provides and what Silverman alone can cultivate that each work comes into being. For the work in LACMA Seeds and Weeds, Silverman’s glazes are all made from different combinations of the following ingredients collected from LACMA: wood ash (gallery floors, trees, construction lumber, and debris), concrete, travertine, ceramic tiles, glass, stones, red iron oxide (made from rusty metals found on the site), soda ash, clay, and tar. Image: Tomoo Gokita