Condo London 2025

Gene Beery, Kern Samuel

January 18–February 15, 2025

Hosted by Soft Opening, London

As part of Condo London 2025, Derosia (New York, NY) is happy to present works by Gene Beery and Kern Samuel at Soft Opening.
 

For over fifty years, Gene Beery (b. 1937, Racine, Wisconsin, d. 2023, Sutter Creek, California) developed a body of work consisting of paintings, photographs, videos, and artist’s books. From his earliest works in the 1960s, Beery’s text-based paintings satirically proclaim their own purpose, or position in the arc of art history, telegraphing artistic anxiety and art world absurdity. Beery arrived in New York in 1959. His first solo exhibition at Alexander Iolas Gallery was both prescient and overlooked, yet during his brief stint in New York he established lasting friendships with Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard and James Rosenquist. Beery left for California in 1963, eventually settling in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, where he developed and expanded his text-based practice. Enlivening his canvases with imagery and technicolor, Beery developed a personal vocabulary of neologisms, koans and puns. In the 1980s, he began creating artist’s books, funded by LeWitt, which simplified his aesthetic and informed the curtness of his late paintings. These works, five of which are included in this presentation, put forth proclamations in black paint on white canvas. Since the turn of the millennium, his practice became increasingly pervasive, his paintings peppering his property, along with impromptu sculptures that cement his longstanding Dadaist sensibility. This relentless production and permeation of work is what led Domenick Ammirati to state in Artforum that, despite never intersecting with its practitioners, Beery may have been the last living Fluxus artist.

The work of Kern Samuel (b. 1990, Mount Hope, Trinidad) centres on painting as a modality to explore material, labor, and the implications thereof. Such tactile engagements as sewing, quilting, dying, folding, and embroidery generate Samuel’s compositions, which often evoke infographic, diagrammatic modes of dissemination. In the two new works on view, the logic of tiling to create an expansive unity and the creation of a fused patchwork quilt becomes a metaphor for an entity created from a multitude of sources. Following one of the simplest quilting patterns of repeating single squares found in the work of the Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers, known as One-Patch, these works include scraps from Samuel’s studio practice compiled over the past four years.

Condo London is a collaborative exhibition involving 49 galleries across 22 London spaces. Host galleries share their spaces with visiting galleries—either by co-curating an exhibition together, or dividing their galleries and allocating spaces.