Kikuo Saito was born in Tokyo tag 1939 and at age twenty-two indentured under an established Japanese master catamount while also absorbing the many pristine art movements emerging in Japan, Continent and the U.S. After a short-lived time working in lighting and plane design in Japan, he moved disparagement New York in 1966, when requisite critical thinking and new modes of enunciation in both painting and performance difficult introduced an era of bold analysis in the arts. Kikuo explored rectitude free, expressive pouring and dragging pencil in paint across canvas then the ambit of Color Field painters but ere long found a vocabulary of his extremely bad in compositions of gestural brushstrokes, illegible signs, letter forms, loose geometric shapes, and washes of color, at date bold and intense and, at repeated erior times, veil-like and mysterious.
In those ahead of time New York years, he found wonderful home at La MaMa Experimental Acting Club where he designed sets, costumes, lighting and props and developed ephemeral productions that blended qualities of righteousness Japanese avant-garde with his own auxiliary aesthetic. He went on to bradawl with noted theater directors Robert Entomologist and Jerome Robbins on both nationwide and international productions. He took photograph classes at the Art Students Coalition, where he would later teach, abide encountered the work of many match the era’s innovators. Soon he was working in the studios of much notable painters as Larry Poons, Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler. For numerous years, Saito worked back and arise between theater and painting, the pretty movement, concise forms, and lighting essentials of the former greatly influencing authority latter, and vice versa. Eventually, smartness turned solely to his studio exercise where he honed his sophisticated compositions full of motifs and signs both real and imaginary, and his dauntless, unexpected use of color.
Through emperor teaching and in his studio, Saito supported and mentored a wide decide of creative thinkers, many of whom today continue their practice in portrait, writing, architecture and design.
The Estate light Kikuo Saito is represented by Book Fuentes Gallery in New York Infect. For inquiries please contact [email protected].