![]() “Sorry / This Painting Temporarily Out of Style,” reads the text. A 1961 example, Out of Style, is characteristic of his wry take on the art world, depicting what appears to be a wall label meant to accompany the blank spot where a picture once hung. ![]() Words are a tool of the visual art experience see Balzac, Magritte, Stuart Davis, etc.,” he told Abelow.īeery began making text-based works on shards of wood and Masonite. So I thought I’d add some text to my otherwise imagistic work. He joined the Art Students League and obtained a job as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, where he became fascinated with the explanatory labels accompanying the paintings hanging on the walls and noticed that “art viewers were very interested in paintings with scraps of text, newspapers, notes like that. “This was the New York of heroin, high crime, diaphragms, Abstract Expressionism, classy openings and the last years of European influence and there was plenty of romantic artist style living and sharp critics and the institutionalizing of too many things.” “My three-plus years in NYC drove me sane,” he told Art Blog Art Blog’s Joshua Abelow in 2013. “The simple material forms, selectively flat colors, imperfect brushwork, and rough, sometimes mottled or yellowing surfaces of his works articulate a peculiarly American nonchalance.”įollowing stints at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and the Layton School of Art in the same city, Beery in 1958 moved to New York, which was then on the cusp of becoming the crucible in which Conceptual art would be forged. Unlike many of his peers, he was unafraid of using humor to comment on the vagaries of the art world. “Gene Beery’s ongoing painterly production over more than half a century resolutely undermines the elitism of the dominant art system (and its transatlantic channels of legitimation) as much as it self-consciously expresses resistance to any ‘high art’ convention,” wrote Kari Rittenbach in a 2019 issue of Artforum. Variously cast, over the course of a career spanning six decades, as a Pop artist, an Expressionist, a Minimalist, and a Conceptualist, Beery was resolutely committed to the idea that words and the ideas they conveyed could alone embody a work of art. His death was announced by New York’s Derosia and the Los Angeles–based Parker Gallery, which represent him. Gene Beery, whose irreverent text-based paintings presaged the work of Conceptualists such as John Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner, died on November 19 in Sutter Creek, California, at the age of eighty-six.
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