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Satoru Abe’s beautiful closing statement
To walk through Satoru Abe: Reaching for the Sun, is to experience 70 years of a searching, creative mind. Starting with the Hawai‘i artist’s figurative paintings from the 1950s, the exhibition moves to hundreds of sketchbook drawings that would serve as a kind of blueprint for four decades of paintings, sculptures, and prints exploring organic forms.
The exhibition ends with a selection of abstract paintings that is stopping everyone in their tracks. People are captivated by the colors, shapes, and experimentation of these works. When visitors learn the paintings were done largely during the pandemic, from 2019 to 2021, when Abe was in his mid-90s, they are even more astounded.
Abe made these works as his swan song. “In 2019, I decided I wanted to complete my career. I was 93 years old, had diminished physical capabilities to sculpt and weld, had given up my car and driver’s license, and lost a fair degree of mobility and independence,” he wrote in the preface to his 2021 self-published catalog of this body of work. “But the need to create something different was still percolating inside me, so I decided to paint again.”
He continued, “I wanted to paint something that I had never painted before. With no preconceived concepts, sketches, or notions in mind, I started my first blank canvas with just a palette of oil paints.”
Even after more than 70 years of creating art, Abe was still breaking new ground. “After I finished 75 paintings, I came to the startling realization that my painting could be viewed in four different ways—right side up, upside down, or rotated 90 degrees,” he wrote.
At that point, says HoMA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Katherine Love, “he started working on [the paintings] in all different directions and even put hanging devices on them in a way that allows them to be hung in any orientation.”
She points out that he treated the paintings as sculptures. “Though sculpting was too physically demanding for him, he could explore the same kinds of ideas, feelings, and shapes through these two-dimensional works.”
Love, who co-curated the exhibition with Curator of European and American Art Alejandra Rojas Silva, says, that after decades of using trees, leaves, and seeds as motifs, “my sense is he was trying not to reference anything in particular, but let the shapes and textures that were intriguing to him guide him through an intuitive process."
“This approach has never been done before and I hope it will broaden your appreciation for art,” Abe continued in the catalog preface. “Art is exciting and it can be appreciated from many angles and points of view. I believe this adventure will enrich our hearts and activate our minds. Discoveries are still to be found after 95 years!”
When Abe wrote that preface, he had made 243 paintings. He would go on to create a second series of larger paintings (they were on view at the University of Hawai‘i last year) for a total of 321, completing them in 2022.
Abe passed away in February, but his presence is felt in his artwork found throughout the museum, such as The Wheel outside Gallery 27, continuing to enrich our hearts and activate our minds.
Read more about the artist and his connection to HoMA on our blog.
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