Artworks

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Renaldo Kuhler (1931 – 2013)

Renaldo Kuhler was born in New Jersey and raised near New York City. In 1948, when Kuhler was 16, his father (a German-born industrial designer) retired from the railroad business and moved the family to a remote cattle ranch in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Kuhler found the isolation of the ranch almost unbearable, and secretly retreated to a fantasy world of his own invention, an imaginary country he called Rocaterrania. He set out to illustrate the history of this nation in plain spiral bound notebooks and other scraps of paper.

What had initially begun as an escape became a secret lifelong quest to illustrate the history of Rocaterrania, one fraught with turmoil and political intrigue. With Rocaterrania, Kuhler created an intricately coded, metaphoric account of his own struggles for independence and freedom from a family, and a society, that had consistently rejected him. He systematically isolated the internal and external forces in his life and fleshed them out with voices, settings, and backstories to make sense of them, sublimating his despair into a cohesive, fully imagined world, and an astounding body of work.