Keyes Art Gallery in Sag Harbor will present an exhibition titled “Dear Uncle Ralph” featuring the work of late artist Ralph Cuomo. The show opens with a reception on Saturday, September 21, from 5 to 7 p.m. The work remains on view through November 1.
Cuomo was a great humble mystery who defied the odds by becoming the first of his family to attend college. He attended Columbia university where he pursued a painting major as an undergraduate.
His journey began in 1947 when the school established its visual arts program. Despite it being a conventional and academic education, the cultural atmosphere in New York City was ablaze at the time with artistic innovation. Cuomo witnessed the unraveling of aesthetic traditions while prominent American artists like Jackson Pollock took center stage.
Equally inspiring were the city’s museums which offered a steady diet of modernist masters like Cézanne, Picasso, Braque and Matisse.
Cuomo was an artist whose brush strokes and shapes firmly connected him with the modernist masters he admired. But while at first exploring several of his precursors’ genres, he progressively defined his own; an otherworldliness captured, set apart, and isolated where shapes, lines and precise tonal work turned material substance into enchantment.
Ralph Cuomo died at his family’s farmhouse in East Moriches in 2002. His prodigious undertaking was not discovered for over two years, when the farmhouse and property was purchased by his niece and great nephew. Hundreds of canvases were found carefully stacked along the walls of his studio, and have not been shown until now.
“Cuomo was very well read, he knew everything about everything. He could talk about medicine, he could talk about history, and he possessed a quietness so opposite to the buoyant abstract life that he painted, uninterrupted and cloistered in his makeshift studio, for over 40 years,” said a Keyes release about the artist.
Keyes Art is at 45 Main Street in Sag Harbor. Visit keyesart.com.
Staff Writer on Sep 17, 2024