Makoto Saito was born in 1952 in the Fukuoka Prefecture, and currently lives and works in Tokyo. Saito, who began producing paintings in the mid-1990s, selects as his subject, people whose faces have the power to stimulate his creativity. While initially appropriating full-body images of filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick or figures who feature in a particular scene within their work, he eventually shifted his focus to the “face” upon which the madness and furor of human beings are engraved. Saito established a distinct style of working, whereby he digitally disassembles and reconstructs portraits of figures such as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, and Antonin Artaud to create blueprints comprised of a series of halftone dots, the digital data of which he transcribes onto the canvas through richly textured applications of paint. Saito discovered other unexpected images from within the details of the enlarged data that he came across during the process of digital disassembling and reconstruction. His abstract paintings series were conceived through collecting these fragments and collaging them in multiple layers upon new canvases.

His major solo exhibitions include “Makoto Saito －Criticality－,” Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, (2019), and “MAKOTO SAITO: SCENE [0],” 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2008). His works are housed in the collections of numerous museums in Japan and overseas including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

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