Catalogues for exhibitions on sale!
Kikuo Saito: 2025
Catalogue for exhibition taking place at KinoSaito | 8 March – 21 December 2025
The Wrong Side of the Brush curated by Kikuo Saito Studio. The Wrong Side of the Brush brings together six paintings, five of them made between 1977 and 1978, and a single one — the blue one, Blue Ladder — made in 1987. The medium is acrylic on canvas kept raw, without gesso, a technique favored by Saito that puts his work into direct conversation with that of Helen Frankenthaler, who also often preferred to paint onto — to paint atop — an unprepared ground. These raw canvas patches or pools enframed by playful color became a hallmark of Saito’s acrylic style of the period, but this intimate grouping of canvases is unified by a more subtle procedure, namely the use of the brush’s handle, “the wrong side of the brush,” to drag lines — squiggly lines, slashing lines — through the background color. The result suggests the fundamentally abstract nature of craquelure, a network of rips, tears, and seams abraded and coming loose — lines along which light might enter the painting and illuminate it from within.
Reminiscence in Color curated by Mikiko Ino Saito. Kikuo Saito forged his own path in the Color Field movement, on a mission to find colors that had never before existed. Curated by Mikiko Ino Saito, wife of the late artist, this selection of works explores his bold and unique use of colors and gestures to evoke moods, feelings, and sensations.
$25 | Available for purchase at KinoSaito Art Center and online at MagCloud.
The Unknown and Its Poetics
Catalogue for exhibition taking place at KinoSaito | 24 May – 21 December 2025
The Unknown and Its Poetics curated by Adrián S. Bará presents a group of works by international artists that live or have lived away from their home country and have been impacted by cross-cultural influences. Artists whose abstract work engages experiences and identities related to the unknown and the construction of home.
As the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi once said, “Nothing is more abstract than reality.” The group of artists included in this survey share the ability to communicate the importance of the small poetic gesture, and explore what we call reality through the language of abstraction.
With works in a range of media, this exhibition will span throughout the art center and will address relationships between cultures, languages, political systems, life under globalization, individuality and liberation.
$25 | Available for purchase at KinoSaito Art Center and online at MagCloud.
Kikuo Saito: Unraveling | Summer Song
Catalogue for exhibition taking place at KinoSaito | 9 March – 15 December 2024
Unraveling curated by Kikuo Saito Studio presents assembly of seven canvases produced between 2009 and 2012 illuminates a period of swift transition in the figure/ground dynamics in Kikuo Saito’s paintings. During this turn, the grids that scaffold his Alphabet paintings give way to a pale lattice that flickers between the fore and ground, almost disappearing. Here, Saito wove chunky curves into the matrixed pictorial surface, precursors to the robust muscular brushwork of the later painting. In this evolution the letters intermittently located throughout the composition become obscured by the tangles of vigorously sketched and boldly colored lines, culminating in an airy web of sinuous strokes, leaving the order of the letters beneath on the edge of the perceptible.
Summer Song also curated by Kikuo Saito Studio presents paintings on display primarily focus on a period of 12 years in which Kikuo Saito returns again and again to the implied shape of an ellipse as a site to explore notational mark-making and dynamic color relationships. Five canvases share a similar composition in which small gestural brushstrokes follow the circumference of a large circle placed atop a monochrome color field. Two early tondos by Saito which have never before been exhibited inverse this composition, with squares revealing raw canvas placed within a round composition.
$25 | Available for purchase at KinoSaito Art Center and online at MagCloud.
NON Objectified
Catalogue for exhibition taking place at KinoSaito | 11 May – 15 December 2024
Non-Objectified curated by Kathy Battista presents a dynamic group of works by female artists operating under the umbrella of abstraction. The show’s title is a play on the term ‘non-objective’ painting, which was founded in the early twentieth century as a reaction to centuries of figurative representation as espoused by the academies. Non-Objectified explores artists’ resistance to the objectification of bodies. The show takes the form of a dialogue between works by a cross-generational, international group of artists selected for their divergent approaches to abstraction, each variation invoking the body in subtle ways.
Featured Artists: Anne-Lise Coste, Jamie Diamond, Katy Dove, Klodin Erb, Clare Goodwin, Sherin Guirgis, Jeewi Lee, Servane Mary, Rachael Matthews, Pat Passlof, Suzanne Perlman, Brie Ruais, Ilana Savdie, Miriam Schapiro, Dee Shapiro, Jemima Stehli, Naama Tsabar, Lesley Vance, Camila Varon, Adam Whitecash, and Rachel Eulena Williams
$25 | Available for purchase at KinoSaito Art Center and online at MagCloud.
Chie Fueki: Petal Storm Memory
Catalogue for exhibition taking place at KinoSaito | 11 May – 15 December 2024
Petal Storm Memory curated by David A. Ross presents a body of work by the artist Chie Fueki, a painter who was born in Japan, raised in Brazil, and came to the United States for her college and graduate art education. She lives and works in Beacon, New York with her husband, the painter Joshua Marsh. The paintings and drawings on view are complex both technically and philosophically. The work deals with issues of place, memory, and longing. Through a laborious and unique process that is more like cinematic montage than the pictorial process of collage, Fueki complicates notions of landscape and portraiture by intimating the ways that time and memory can simultaneously distort and rectify the ways in which we build and maintain memories of places and people—and of memory itself.
$25 | Available for purchase at KinoSaito Art Center and online at MagCloud.
Kikuo Saito and Friends: New York City Downtown and Beyond, 1970s and 1980s
Catalogue for exhibition taking place at KinoSaito | 13 May – 17 December 2023
Kikuo Saito and Friends: New York City Downtown and Beyond, 1970s and 1980s, curated by renowned critic Karen Wilkin. This show features artwork by Saito and the close circle of artists that he was associated with for over 20 years.
Featured Artists: Willard Boepple, Anthony Caro, Dan Christensen, Paula DeLuccia, Friedel Dzubas, Helen Frankenthaler, John Griefen, Darryl Hughto, Ronnie Landfield, John McLean, Kenneth Noland, William Noland, Larry Poons, Peter Reginato, Susan Roth, Kikuo Saito, Francine Tint, Ann Walsh, James Walsh, Michael L. Williams, Robert Wilson, and Larry Zox
$25 | Available for purchase at KinoSaito Art Center and online at MagCloud.