Biography

American painter

Kikuo Saito (斉藤規矩夫, Saitō Kikuo, –) was a Japanese-born American abstract painter with ties to the Color Field movement and Lyrical abstraction.

Biography examples for kids: Kikuo Saito (–) was a Japanese American abstract painter with ties to the Color Field tradition. Born in Tokyo, he came to New York City in , where he worked as an assistant for such eminent painters as Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Larry Poons.

A former assistant to Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Larry Poons, Saito's work infuses richly saturated colorscapes with delicately drawn lines. Saito was the creator of sui generis theatre and dance events, collaborating with innovative directors and choreographers Robert Wilson, Peter Brook, Jerome Robbins, and dancer and choreographer Eva Maier, to whom he was married for several decades.

His productions combined wordless drama in the poetic frameworks of light, costumes, music, and dance, most of which he devised and directed himself.

Early life and education

Kikuo Saito was born in Tokyo in ^[1] He began painting when he was 17 years old, and worked for 3 years as a proctor and studio technician at the workshop of Sensei Itoh, an established Japanese painter.

During this time, Saito gained an understanding of both the traditional arts of Japan as well as contemporary movements such as the Gutai Group.

Autobiography examples He is survived by his wife Mikiko Ino. Born in Tokyo in , Saito came to New York in He had already begun to design stage settings for modern dance in Japan, and would continue to do so in the US. When he first arrived, however, he went to work as a studio assistant for such eminent artists as Larry Poons, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler.. Saito continued to design for the theater and dance until , working internationally with some of the most innovative directors and choreographers of the period.

He also had an interest in the burgeoning New York City art world and movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Color Field, and Pop Art.^[2]

Saito moved to New York in at the age of The journey across the United States to New York provided him a chance meeting with Ellen Stewart, founder of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, whom he would later describe as his American mother.

Once in New York, Saito worked with Stewart at La MaMa and was instrumental in bringing Japanese avant-garde dramatist Shuji Terayama to La MaMa in In his early years in New York, Saito balanced painting with theatre, supporting himself with carpentry and working on loft build-outs in Soho.

Career

Painting

The composition of many of Saito's paintings was significantly influenced by and in dialogue with the geography of his theatre productions.

Saito's dualistic nature took material form in the interplay between the collaborative theatre and the private realm of the painting studio.

Contact — KIKUO SAITO

Kikuo Saito - Artists - Jill Newhouse Gallery

Kikuo Saito - Biography | Vallarino Fine Art

Settings

Art critic Karen Wilkin wrote that "if we are attentive, we discover that characters from his stage pieces have been reincarnated as abstract configurations within his paintings, reborn as the records of animated gestures that retain the individuality of their sources."^[3]

A commonality in the entire body of Saito's work, both on stage or on canvas, focuses on written signs.

Repeated investigations of alphabet in Saito's work, both real and made-up, legible and obscured, speak to moments in his personal history.^[4] As a young immigrant in a country whose language he did not speak, Saito wrote space for himself in the already-established Color Field tradition by constructing his own painterly lexicon.

Opposing motifs of free gestural brushstrokes and elegant, ordered lettering allude again to his double practice as painter and architect of poetic performance. Abstraction in Saito's work points to a meditation on the instabilities and impermanence of language and the mutability of meaning.

Biography examples for students

Kikuo Saito — was a Japanese American abstract painter with ties to the Color Field tradition. Saito's work infuses richly saturated colorscapes with delicately drawn lines. Saito's paintings have been featured in numerous solo and group shows worldwide, and are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Museums, and numerous private and corporate collections. KinoSaito, a non-profit museum and art space in Verplanck, New York, will open in , in honor of Saito's interdisciplinary practice and spirit. Book A Private Viewing.

A space opens once departing from structuralist systems of transmuting signs, and Saito fills that space with vibrant color.

Theatre

Saito worked with actors and dancers, devising, directing, and creating the decor and costumes for stage performances, sometimes collaborating with Wilson, Brook, and Maier.

He drew inspiration from Japanese theatrical traditions of Kabuki and Noh plays, and was an innovator with water and other nontraditional materials onstage. He designed sets for numerous productions at La MaMa and for the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. He collaborated with Wilson on projects in Shiraz, Iran, and in Paris created the set for Brook's Conference of the Birds.

In he was the artist-in-residence at Duke University, where in collaboration with Maier he created the conceptual, wordless performance Toy Garden, which would later be performed at La MaMa.^[5] Saito said Toy Garden was about what he imagined in the missing half of Vittore Carpaccio's painting "Two Venetian Ladies," a work with a famously-missing left side.^[6]

Exhibitions

Saito had his first solo exhibition at Deitcher O'Reilly Gallery on 67th Street in He would go on to exhibit both solo and group shows in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

He is represented in collections in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and numerous private collections. An exhibition called "The Final Years", featuring work made in the year leading up to Saito's death, opened at the Leslie Feely Fine Art Gallery on East 68th Street in New York City from September 15 - October 14, ^[7]

In , Saito and his partner Mikiko Ino purchased the former St.

Patrick's School property in Verplanck, New York and recommissioned it as KinoSaito, a multidisciplinary nonprofit museum and art space projected to open to the public in ^[8]

Selected museum collections

• Modern and Contemporary Art | The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
• The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
• Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
• Art Gallery of Alberta, Alberta, Canada
• Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Ontario, Canada
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
• Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
• Queens University, Ontario, Canada
• John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida
• Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, Netherlands
• Ulster Museum, Northern Ireland
• University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada

Theatrical productions

• setting for modern dance, an early collaborations with Toshiro Ogawa Lighting Designer at Waseda University, Tokyo
• setting for modern dance with LD Toshiro Ogawa, Iino Hall, Tokyo
• set designed for Tom Eyen's Sara B.

  Divine, Spoleto Festival, Spoleto, Italy

• set for Tom Paine directed by Tom O'Horgan, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York, New York
• set for Rochelle Owens' Futz directed by Tom O'Horgan, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York, New York
• worked on sets for Robert Wilson's theatre piece at 6th Festival of the Arts, Shiraz, Iran
• work done on sets for Robert Wilson, Opera Comique, Paris
• wrote and directed film for National Television, Iran
• Haftan, theatre piece at Byrd Hoffman Foundation, New York (rehearsal/workshop at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club)^[9]
• Water Play, theatre piece at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York, New York
• set for Peter Brook's Conference of the Birds, Paris
• Toy Garden, The Ark (Duke University), Durham, North Carolina
• Toy Garden, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York, New York
• Ash Garden, LaGuardia High School, New York, New York

References

External links