‘Your Move’, 2000s ‘Sanctuary’, 2000s ‘Burning Cardboard’, 2000s ‘The Shamrock Ranch To Dos’, 1993 acrylic on canvas 20 × 16 inches ‘Family Portrait’, 1970s acrylic on canvas 4 panels, each 20 × 20 inches overall dimensions 20 × 86 inches ‘The Worlds Greatest Nonperforming Arrythmic Percussionist’, 2000s acrylic and graphite on canvas 16 × 20 inches ‘7 Felicitations’, 1970s acrylic on canvas 20 × 26 inches ‘Formal Portrait’, 2000s acrylic and graphite on canvas 12 × 16 inches ‘The Ethical Crisis Playoffs’, 1970s acrylic on canvas 27 × 42 inches ‘What Is the Formula?’, 2000s acrylic on canvas 20 × 16 inches ‘Unknown Unknowns’, 2010 acrylic and graphite on canvas 16 × 20 inches ‘The Distractor’, 2000s acrylic on canvas 16 × 12 inches ‘Parenthood Art’, 1970s acrylic on canvas 50 × 8 inches ‘I’ve Seen the Graveyard’, 2000 acrylic and graphite on canvas 20 × 16 inches ‘Hello! Bacteria Farm!’, 2000s acrylic and graphite on canvas 16 × 20 inches ‘I’m Only Interested in This!’, 1999 acrylic and graphite on canvas 14 × 11 inches ‘The Master Speaks’, 1970s acrylic on canvas 26 ¼ × 22 inches ‘My Life Is Now Too Short to Spend Much Time on Formal Painting Art Concerns’, 2000s acrylic and graphite on canvas 24 × 18 inches ‘The Burden of Vulnerable Beauty’, 2000s acrylic on cardboard 44 × 36 ½ inches ‘Art Continues to Create Artists’, 2010 graphite on canvas 14 × 11 inches ‘No More Spectrum Credit’, 1970s acrylic on canvas 30 × 36 inches ‘Hurling World Tour’, 2005 acrylic on canvas 20 × 16 inches ‘Important American Art Museums’, 1970s acrylic on canvas 24 × 27 ½ inches ‘A Nice Painting’, 1994 acrylic on canvas 20 × 16 inches ‘How I Worried About Life and Art All the Way Through Them and Everything Turned out All Right Anyway’, 1990s acrylic on canvas 13 ½ × 16 inches ‘Quixotic’, 1975 acrylic on canvas 36 × 25 ½ inches ‘An Art Movement’s Recipe for Universal Acceptance’, 1999 acrylic and graphite on canvas 24 × 18 inches ‘No Campy Goading Here’, 1990 acrylic on canvas 18 × 14 ¼ inches ‘Gift’, 2012 acrylic and graphite on canvas 14 × 18 inches ‘A Chant to Counter Technological Excess’, 1990s acrylic and graphite on canvas 25 × 22 inches ‘Shopping List’, 2018 acrylic on canvas 36 × 24 inches ‘A Magical Cure All Device’, 2007 acrylic and graphite on canvas 20 × 16 inches ‘Mere Inheritors’, 2000s acrylic and graphite on canvas 20 × 16 inches ‘Zip! Zap! You Are Extinct Mr. and Mrs. Birdy’, 2013-2016 acrylic and graphite on canvas 18 × 14 inches ‘Frat’rnal Regalia’, 1970s acrylic on canvas 11 × 20 inches ‘Two Exciting Months’, 2000s acrylic and graphite on canvas 18 × 36 inches ‘The Frozen Spring Water Bar!’, 2000 acrylic and graphite on canvas 20 × 16 inches ‘Poeticize Life / Happy Trails!’, 2000s acrylic and graphite on canvas 20 × 16 inches

Gene Beery (b. 1937, Racine, Wisconsin) is a critically important conceptual artist based in Sutter Creek, California. His singular, eccentric practice—first developed in the late 1950s in New York—presaged much of the language-based explorations of the second half of the 20th century.

For two years, Beery worked as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art, where “some of the Cezanne pictures, if you watched them long enough, they’d move.” At the museum he also encountered a young night clerk called Sol LeWitt, who would later become his most loyal patron and collector. After fielding praise from Max Ernst, securing an award from the William and Norma Copley Foundation, and realizing an exhibition at the important Alexander Iolas Gallery, he left New York for Northern California in 1963. “I used to tell people that my trip to New York drove me sane,” Beery once noted. “Not insane, sane.”

In 1970, he was included in a pair of exhibitions in Seattle and Vancouver organized by Lucy Lippard. Titled after the human populations of both cities, the presentations were milestones in the history of conceptual, process, and land art. Beery was also featured in the 1975 Whitney Biennial alongside Scott Burton, Miyoko Ito, Allen Ruppersberg, and many others. After a 1979 MATRIX exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut, Beery’s work was not presented publicly until he joined the Mitchell Algus Gallery roster in 1999.

Beery’s earliest works on canvas are post-modern reflections on the nature of art, the role of the artist, and the razor’s edge between success and failure. Mid-career efforts feature inside jokes, outside koans, and obliquely aspirational proclamations as if drafted by a gifted, wayward sign painter. Later works, many of which include pithy and poetic slogans atop crudely rendered t-shirts, cut to the quick of what it means for an artist to make their mark, if only for one extraordinary and pathetic sweep across the canvas.

Transmissions from Logoscape Ranch presents an overview of Beery’s gregarious, trailblazing, and under-known painting practice alongside videos featuring the family compound in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas where the artist has lived and worked for over 40 years. The exhibition is adapted from New Mythic Visualizations at Cushion Works in San Francisco (2019), Beery’s first Bay Area showing since 1970, when he worked as a Yellow Cab driver and dispatcher.

A companion publication, Transmissions from Logoscape Ranch: Pictures for Internet, 2006-2017 (Song Cycle no. 4), compiles JPEGs that Beery shared with his network over the past two decades, illustrating his practice and its sitedness. It is available at the exhibition, alongside original copies of Beery’s artist books.

Beery was recently celebrated with a career-spanning exhibition at Fri Art Kunsthalle in Fribourg, Switzerland, 2019 (organized by Balthazar Lovay), accompanied by the artist’s first monograph, published by Mousse. Other recent exhibitions include Wall Dancers, Shoot the Lobster, Los Angeles, 2017; Logoscape/Visual Percussion, Jan Kaps, Cologne, 2016 (organized by Gregor Quack); and Algus Greenspon, New York, 2013 & 2010.

—Nick Irvin & Jordan Stein

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