Gary Edward Blum (American, b. 1971) is a San Francisco-based artist who merges painting and photography, and Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and trompe l'oeil realism, into a single hybrid practice.,His acrylic-on-canvas paintings often hide a grid beneath muted pigment and use a painted, trompe l'oeil piece of paper that appears taped to the canvas, replicating part of the composition it sits on.
Blum was born in Montara, California, a coastal town near San Francisco, and is the grandson of Italian and Swiss immigrants.He earned a B.A. in Graphic Design from California State University, Chico, in 1993 and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002. A trip to India in 2000 exposed him to Eastern philosophy and religion, and the ideas of dependent opposition and meditation he encountered there still run through his work.,
From 2015 to 2017 he was an affiliate artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, where he expanded from painting into photography, documenting Building T828 on the former military site at both small and monumental scale.,Beginning in 2016, he started incorporating photography into his paintings by intentionally degrading images and layering them with paint washes and graphic interventions, creating a hybrid medium with a sculptural quality.Duality, the tension between opposing elements, runs through the resulting work, which he has described as a continuous dialogue between the acts of creating and destroying.,
For the Persistence of Form Solo Series with Fakewhale, released on objkt.com in May 2024, he paired two photographic works, ALL I'VE EVER KNOWN and HALF CAUGHT MEMORY, each beginning from a monochromatic photograph overlaid with vibrant geometric shapes and lines.His work has been exhibited across the United States and is held in the permanent collections of the Crocker Art Museum and the Monterey Museum of Art,and has been reviewed in publications including the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and Art in America.
