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Oct. 30, 2026

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 HoMA PRESENTS RALPH IWAMOTO’S SURREALIST PAINTINGS FROM VILCEK FOUNDATION 

WHAT: Imagined Flora: Ralph Iwamoto's Surrealist Beginnings
WHEN: On view through Feb. 7, 2027
WHERE: Honolulu Museum of Art, 900 S Beretania St., 808-532-8700 

HONOLULU, HAWAI‘I—The Honolulu Museum of Art presents Imagined Flora: Ralph Iwamoto’s Surrealist Beginnings, an intimate exhibition of seven paintings on loan from the Vilcek Foundation. On view through February 7, 2027, the show reveals the artist’s brief but compelling brush with Surrealism.

In Hawai‘i, Iwamoto is best known for his Minimalist paintings. Imagined Flora introduces to the public work marked by lush, biomorphic forms that evoke surreal ecosystems. These invented worlds are animated by growth and transformation inspired by modernism in the postwar art world.

Wild Growth, 1955. Oil on canvas (VF2025.07.07)

Born and raised on O‘ahu to parents of Japanese heritage, Iwamoto witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor as a teenager in 1941. After serving in World War II, he moved to New York in 1948 on the GI Bill to study at the Art Students League, entering the same postwar milieu that also drew artists connected to the Metcalf Chateau circle, including Tadashi Sato, Satoru Abe, and Tetsuo Ochikubo. Like them, Iwamoto moved between island and mainland contexts, sustaining ties to Hawaiʻi while developing his career in New York. 

While working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, Iwamoto encountered Wifredo Lam’s The Jungle, a painting that fused Afro Caribbean history with Surrealism and modernist form. For an artist from Hawaiʻi navigating New York’s art world, Lam’s work offered a powerful model of how island histories and global abstraction could intersect. At the same time, Iwamoto worked in a Manhattan shop that sold flowers and objects from Hawai‘i.

Produced in New York in 1955, the paintings in this exhibition draw on memories of Hawai‘i’s lush tropical flora, transforming heliconia, orchids, and moss into upright, hybrid forms that appear at once botanical, skeletal, and human.

This installation offers one of the first opportunities in Honolulu to encounter a rarely exhibited group of his earlier, dreamlike paintings that capture a pivotal transition before Iwamoto turned to geometric abstraction and Minimalism.

The New York–based Vilcek Foundation is in the process of moving its headquarters to Honolulu, a city shaped by immigration and that honors the Indigenous community, factors important to the foundation. It has had a presence in Honolulu since 2007, awarding grants to organizations such as the Hawai‘i International Film Festival, Hawai‘i Youth Symphony, B+HARI, Liljestrand Foundation and the Popolo Project. The Museum’s current exhibition Divine Disruption: The Art of Tsherin Sherpa is supported by a grant from the Vilcek Foundation. In addition, HoMA’s director of curatorial affairs Catherine Whitney sits on the foundation’s board.

Images available on request.

Honolulu Museum of Art Centennial
On April 8, 2027, the Honolulu Museum of Art will kick off 18 months of events and programming to celebrate its centennial. Highlights include the unveiling of the relocated and reinstalled Arts of Hawai‘i Gallery, free admission throughout April, and the opening of a Creativity Hub—a community space of learning and discovery in the Honolulu Museum of Art School. 

About the Honolulu Museum of Art

www.honolulumuseum.org

Communications: 808-532-8712

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