About Manabu Mabe

Manabu Mabe – Brazilian painter of Japanese origin, born in Kumamoto (Japan) on September 14, 1924, and died in São Paulo (Brazil) on September 22, 1997.
In 1934 his family moved to Brazil, settling in the port city of Santos. Subsequently, the family moved inland and Mabe began working as a pawn in a Sao Paulo coffee plantation and later as a salesman for ties. In this activity, Mabe already deployed his artistic talent with the decorated cited garments with applied paint in his hand. Self-taught painter, his professional work was developed starting from 1946, although for many years this was payout with his work on plantations and as a seller. In his spare time, Mabe executed paintings in an abstract style and vibrant coloring that relate him stylistically with American abstract expressionism’s gestural painting and European lyrical abstraction practiced by Georges Mathieu; it traveled to Brazil in 1959 where he, as it was characteristic in the French painter, different canvases in public. The first exhibition in which participated Mabe took place in 1951, and since that date did so regularly. His style was able to combine the immediacy next to both European and American, informalism with vibrant colors and passages of calligraphic quality that bring closer you to the Japanese art on the one hand (see: Japan: art and culture). He/She participated in the first biennial of young artists held in Paris in 1959, the same year that held in the Gallery Barcinsky of Rio de Janeiro his first individual exhibition.