Born in 1939 in Tokyo, Kikuo Saito emigrated to New York City in 1966. Linked to the Color Field and Lyrical Abstraction movements, the artist was a studio assistant for Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Poons and Kenneth Noland as well as a choreographer and theatre director who collaborated with Jerome Robbins, Peter Brook and Robert Wilson. Interested in abstraction across genres, Saito was well known for his manipulation of light, movement and color on both the canvas and stage; most notably, the artist often painted on the floor, moving in circles above his canvases as he applied paint to them. Fascinated by non-verbal communication, Saito’s work repeatedly investigates the ability for language to become image. His bold and elegant brushstrokes, expressively laid down, are suggestive of his personal experience as an immigrant, unable to speak the language of his new home, communicating through signs and emotions. Exhibited internationally, the artist’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art both in New York, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina and the Art Gallery of Alberta in Canada among others. Saito passed away in 2016 in New York. In 2020 the nonprofit organization KinoSaito in Verplanck, New York opened in honor of Kikuo Saito’s dedication to both abstract art and interdisciplinary practice.