Agonia

Mabe painted two different works with the title of Agony in 1963 and described his subject as an expression of the existential anguish produced by the binary oppositions of human experience. Reflecting on the subject in his 1986 retrospective, he looked specifically to “Joy and sadness, love and hatred. From the most remote antiquity to present times, man survives under the signs of life and death. The spirit of life is constructive, and the spirit of death shines splendidly in space.”