Kikuo Saito

A former assistant to Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Larry Poons, Saito's work infuses richly saturated colorscapes with delicately drawn lines.

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.

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.

[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.

[7] In 2014, 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 2020[8]