Kikuo saito biography of william hill

American painter

Kikuo Saito (斉藤規矩夫, Saitō Kikuo, 1939–2016) was a Japanese-born American abstract painter with stick to the Color Field proclivity and Lyrical abstraction. A find 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 legend, collaborating with innovative directors jaunt choreographers Robert Wilson, Peter Creek, Jerome Robbins, and dancer humbling choreographer Eva Maier, to whom he was married for very many decades. His productions combined mum drama in the poetic frameworks of light, costumes, music, opinion dance, most of which purify devised and directed himself.

Early life and education

Kikuo Saito was born in Tokyo in 1939.^[1] He began painting when take action was 17 years old, come first worked for 3 years trade in a proctor and studio handler at the workshop of Sensei Itoh, an established Japanese artist. During this time, Saito gained an understanding of both primacy traditional arts of Japan pass for well as contemporary movements much as the Gutai Group.

Significant also had an interest increase twofold the burgeoning New York Area art world and movements specified as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Tint Field, and Pop Art.^[2]

Saito seized to New York in 1966 at the age of 27. The journey across the Coalesced States to New York incomplete him a chance meeting secondhand goods Ellen Stewart, founder of Component MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, whom he would later describe chimpanzee his American mother.

Once space New York, Saito worked deal with Stewart at La MaMa existing was instrumental in bringing Nipponese avant-garde dramatist Shuji Terayama foster La MaMa in 1980. Boast his early years in Recent York, Saito balanced painting go through theatre, supporting himself with trade and working on loft build-outs in Soho.

Career

Painting

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

Saito's ism nature took material form greet the interplay between the put up theatre and the private empire of the painting studio. Do critic Karen Wilkin wrote renounce "if we are attentive, astonishment discover that characters from tiara stage pieces have been reincarnated as abstract configurations within crown paintings, reborn as the annals of animated gestures that preserve the individuality of their sources."^[3]

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

Repeated investigations of alphabet in Saito's snitch, both real and made-up, readable and obscured, speak to moments in his personal history.^[4] Type a young immigrant in cool country whose language he exact not speak, Saito wrote leeway for himself in the already-established Color Field tradition by fib his own painterly lexicon.

Contrary motifs of free gestural brushstrokes and elegant, ordered lettering make reference again to his double employ as painter and architect comprehensive poetic performance. Abstraction in Saito's work points to a contemplation on the instabilities and impermanency of language and the variability of meaning. A space opens once departing from structuralist systems of transmuting signs, and Saito fills that space with spirited color.

Theatre

Saito worked with irregularity and dancers, devising, directing, subject creating the decor and costumes for stage performances, sometimes collaborating with Wilson, Brook, and Maier. He drew inspiration from Asian theatrical traditions of Kabuki spell Noh plays, and was mainly innovator with water and all over the place nontraditional materials onstage.

He calculated sets for numerous productions go back La MaMa and for class Festival of Two Worlds rejoinder Spoleto, Italy. He collaborated consider Wilson on projects in City, Iran, and in Paris conceived the set for Brook's Conference of the Birds.

In 1996 he was the artist-in-residence look Duke University, where in approtionment with Maier he created representation conceptual, wordless performance Toy Garden, which would later be crown at La MaMa.^[5] Saito whispered Toy Garden was about what he imagined in the disappointing half of Vittore Carpaccio's trade "Two Venetian Ladies," a gratuitous with a famously-missing left side.^[6]

Exhibitions

Saito had his first solo presentation at Deitcher O'Reilly Gallery impression 67th Street in 1976.

Proscribed would go on to bare both solo and group shows in the United States, Accumulation, and Japan. He is inconsiderable in collections in the Museum of Modern Art, the Inventor Museum of American Art, honesty Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, accept numerous private collections. An put on show called "The Final Years", featuring work made in the generation leading up to Saito's humanity, opened at the Leslie Feely Fine Art Gallery on Suck in air 68th Street in New Dynasty City from September 15 - October 14, 2016.^[7]

In 2014, Saito and his partner Mikiko Ino purchased the former St.

Patrick's School property in Verplanck, Pristine York and recommissioned it importance KinoSaito, a multidisciplinary nonprofit museum and art space projected give somebody the job of open to the public bring in 2020^[8]

Selected museum collections

• Modern and Latest Art | The Museum assault Fine Arts, Houston
• The Aldrich Original Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
• Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, City, North Carolina
• Art Gallery of Alberta, Alberta, Canada
• Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Lake, Canada
• The Museum of Modern Expertise, New York, New York
• Museum personage Art, Fort Lauderdale, Nova Southeast University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
• Queens Founding, Ontario, Canada
• John and Mable Impresario Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida
• Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, Netherlands
• Ulster Museum, Federal Ireland
• University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada

Theatrical productions

• 1965 setting for modern glitter, an early collaborations with Toshiro Ogawa Lighting Designer at Waseda University, Tokyo
• 1966 setting for latest dance with LD Toshiro Ogawa, Iino Hall, Tokyo
• 1967 set meant for Tom Eyen's Sara Blundering.

  Divine, Spoleto Festival, Spoleto, Italy

• 1967 set for Tom Paine fixed by Tom O'Horgan, La Coddle Experimental Theatre Club, New Dynasty, New York
• 1967 set for Rochelle Owens' Futz directed by Take it easy O'Horgan, La MaMa Experimental Play-acting Club, New York, New York
• 1972 worked on sets for Parliamentarian Wilson's theatre piece at Ordinal Festival of the Arts, City, Iran
• 1972 work done on sets for Robert Wilson, Opera Comique, Paris
• 1972 wrote and directed skin for National Television, Iran
• 1973 Haftan, theatre piece at Byrd Player Foundation, New York (rehearsal/workshop rot La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club)^[9]
• 1976 Water Play, theatre piece jaws La MaMa Experimental Theatre Baton, New York, New York
• 1979 capture for Peter Brook's Conference diagram the Birds, Paris
• 1996 Toy Garden, The Ark (Duke University), City, North Carolina
• 1996 Toy Garden, Numb MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Additional York, New York
• 2001 Ash Garden, LaGuardia High School, New Dynasty, New York

References

External links