Joseph Raffael was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1933. H was the youngest child and only son of Sicilian and Swiss Irish parents — Joseph Marino Raffaele and Cora Kaelin Raffaele.

Interested in drawing from an early age, Raffael spent his high school years taking classes at the nearby Brooklyn museum and later attended Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in New York City. Upon graduation he received his BFA. In 1958 he won a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Florence and Rome.

Raffael’s distinctively original art has earned critical praise ever since the mid ‘60s while he was living in New York City and later, in Marin County, California. During these years, he taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and later at the University of California, Davis and Berkeley campuses as well as at California State University in Sacramento.

After a series of life-changing events, Raffael and his second wife, Lannis, moved to Antibes, France in 1986, where they have lived for nearly three decades.

The artist’s paintings are in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and numerous other public and private collections.

Joseph Raffael is represented by Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York City. Our thanks to Nancy Hoffman for extending these magnificant works to us for this beautiful retrospective.

The exhibiiton runs through July 10th.