Painting as Performance / Performance as Painting

The Theater Paintings of Kikuo Saito

9 Sep. – 19 Dec. 2021

Much of Kikuo Saito’s career can be characterized as a dialogue between his two great passions: painting and theater. He worked seamlessly between the collaborative realm of theater design and production —staging performances, costuming actors, creating props and backdrops — and a more private, singular pursuit in his painting studio. Some motifs found in his paintings, such as arrows or directional gestures reference and wryly subvert various systems of choreographic and movement notation, and many of the characters and character-like props of his theater work make unexpected appearances in his canvases, in an intricate dance with purely painterly abstraction.

 A close look at the paintings in this inaugural exhibition will reveal abstracted references to some of these same animals and people, now appearing on “stages” of canvas where movement is suggested by a brush gesture, and light is translated through the interplay of color. 

Kikuo Saito, Spanish Rock, 1999, oil on canvas, 56 ¾″ x 91″