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A Life's Work

Curators at the Honolulu Museum of Art wanted to introduce viewers to Abe's larger body of work—but they didn't expect that there would be so much of it.

photo inside of a gallery, focusing on a sculpture
ABOVE: A retrospective exhibition of Satoru Abe's work, Reaching for the Sun, opened at the Honolulu Museum of Art just months before the prolific Hawaii artist passed away last February at age 98. Among the works featured from a lifetime of production in multiple media is the 1971 copper sculpture, "Trees in a Box". PHOTO COURTESY HONOLULU MUSEUM OF ART/ALEC SINGER

 

When Honolulu Museum of Art curators began assembling Satoru Abe: Reaching for the Sun, a retrospective spanning the prolific Hawaii artist's seventy-year career, they knew people would be familiar with his work. Abe's large-scale public sculptures grace Daniel K. Inouye International Airport, the Hawaii Convention Center and high schools across the state. 

"Satoru was still producing work at such a rapid pace, with hundreds of paintings made in the last few years," says Alejandra Rojas Silva, co-curator of the retrospective, on display until July 20, 2025. Late into his 90s, during the pandemic, Abe had produced more than a hundred abstract paintings meant to hang in any orientation. "Today there is often a brighter spotlight placed on young and emerging artists," says co-curator Katherine Love. "But Abe shows us that even an artist in his 90s may remain a vital creative force."

side portrait of a person sitting beside a sculpture

Satoru Abe. PHOTO COURTESY HONOLULU MUSEUM OF ART/ALEC SINGER

 

Abe was born in Honolulu in 1926, "but for me, life started ... in 1948, when I said I gon' be an artist," he said in a 2014 interview. "One day I realized that I'm very unique, that if I don't create these things, they'll never be existing in the world." His career has spanned New York, Japan and Hawaii, where he returned in the 1970s and helped shape Modernist art in the Islands. HoMA's exhibition showcases his fluidity in different media, including paint, wood and metal, and moves from his early ink sketches in the 1950s and 60s to the starkness of his "white paintings" period to later works featuring elements of trees, seeds and leaves.

"He was very involved and eager to help select the pieces that would be included," Love says. Especially significant to Abe were a portrait of a solitary figure from 1955 and a piece titled "Uncertain Landscape," with dark splotches and moody, saturated colors, painted in 1995 "during a difficult time while his wife, Ruth, was ill," Love says. 

Abe passed away in early February 2025. Rojas Silva says, "We knew that Satoru was in his twilight years ... but somehow we were still not prepared to lose him. This exhibition takes on a new meaning now, as a place to be with him and learn from his work." 

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Story By Martha Cheng

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