ABSTRACT
Considered one of the most outstanding painters in Latin America in the late 1950s and 1960s, and a master of colours and stains resembling ideograms, Mabe moved to Brazil at age ten and settled with his family on a coffee plantation in the interior of Sao Paulo. An autodidact, he began painting in the middle of the coffee fields on breaks from his labours; when he had no canvasses, he substituted coffee sacks. In 1956 he began his abstract phase, which earned him great respect and admiration. When he won the Grand Prize at the fifth Bienale de Sao Paulo in 1959, he had to rush to get his Brazilian citizenship in order to accept the award. Mabe received more than eighty international awards and left an archive of some 3,000 paintings, among them some of the highest prized contem porary Brazilian canvasses.
