Artnet kikuo saito

Kikuo Saito was born in Tokyo in 1939 and at age twenty-two apprenticed under an established Japanese master painter while also absorbing the many new art movements emerging in Japan, Europe and the U.S. After a brief time working in lighting and stage design in Japan, he moved to New York in 1966, when radical thinking and new modes of expression in both painting and performance had introduced an era of bold experimentation in the arts.

Kikuo explored the free, expressive pouring and dragging of paint across canvas then the purview of Color Field painters but soon found a vocabulary of his own in compositions of gestural brushstrokes, cryptic signs, letter forms, loose geometric shapes, and washes of color, at times bold and intense and, at other times, veil-like and mysterious.