Gene Beery (October 13, 1937 â November 19, 2023) was an American painter and photographer, who has been described as an expressionist, Pop artist, minimalist, and conceptualist over his career of fifty-plus years. He was primarily known for his text-based canvases, based on the concept that words and the ideas they provoke can exist as works of art in themselves. Living and working in New York City in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Beery was at the center of the development of both Pop and Conceptual art. From the 1990s, Beery also worked as a photographer, intimately documenting his family, friends and life in a snapshot style. He lived and worked in Sutter Creek, California until his death on November 19, 2023, at the age of 86.
Beery is represented by Derosia in New York, and Parker Gallery in Los Angeles.
Beery was born in Racine, Wisconsin, on October 13, 1937. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and the Layton School of Art, Milwaukee before moving to New York City in the late 1950s where he joined the Arts Student League and became a guard at the Museum of Modern Art.
Working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art he was befriended by James Rosenquist and Sol LeWitt, his Hester Street neighbor. In 1961 BeeryâÂÂs ramshackle hybrid paintings incorporating words and figures were selected for the Museum of Modern ArtâÂÂs Recent Figure Painting U.S.A. where they caught Max ErnstâÂÂs attention. The surrealist was so impressed he awarded Beery $100 on the spot. This windfall was followed by another award from the William and Norma Copley Foundation. Clearly, BeeryâÂÂs art had struck a chord within New YorkâÂÂs still extant surrealist community. Marcel Duchamp, who upon meeting the artist for the first time awarded him a cigar, was soon a fan and must have seen in BeeryâÂÂs art many of the same qualities he found in the art of Louis Eilshemius; paintings that were eccentric, direct, primitive, and archetypically American.
Gene BeeryâÂÂs conceit, that words and the ideas they convey could alone account for a work of art, attracted the attention of fellow artists. His work was iconoclastic, funny and smart. Seen in art world hindsight it was also ahead of its time, prefiguring the language-based conceptual art of the late 1960s, from John Baldessari to Lawrence Weiner and Robert Barry. While other artists using text and numbers who emerged in the 1960s produced mostly cerebral work lacking evidence of the artistâÂÂs hand, Beery seemingly poked fun at the high Conceptualism of the day. He continued to make his uniquely homespun and humorously irreverent canvases, the rawness of their execution a throwback to the Abstract Expressionists. BeeryâÂÂs free-wheeling humor and graphic flair also align his work with that other then-developing style, Pop Art. Over the years Sol LeWitt remained BeeryâÂÂs greatest champion; rescuing works from his abandoned New York studio and making these a foundational part of the Sol and Carol LeWitt collection at the Wadsworth Atheneum, as well as underwriting the publication of BeeryâÂÂs many artistâÂÂs books.
After a successful exhibition of his paintings at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in New York in 1963 Beery left town to take residence in San Francisco, and later Petaluma. Several years later the artist moved into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains outside Sacramento where he continues to live and work.