Equally devoted to performance and painting, Kikuo Saito bridged several worlds across a career that spanned two continents. A native of Japan, he arrived in New York in 1966 with a background in theater and pursued a style of performance art that synthesized choreography, set design, and costume with poetry. Saito simultaneously began to build a career in the visual arts, working as a studio assistant to New York’s abstract artists.
Saito typically constructs his compositions from a warm-toned ground layer of pigment that serves as a strong foil to the more gestural passages. He took advantage of the vertical format to evoke the stacked spaces of traditional Japanese landscape painting. Describing Saito’s treatment of color and line, curator and art critic Karen Wilkin observed: “It’s as if we were watching a deeply moving, unfamiliar play performed in a language we do not speak. The actors’ words escape us, but the emotion rings true.”
Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Website
http://www.kikuosaito.com/
