The Town of Vail’s Art in Public Places (AIPP) is pleased to present a temporary sculpture exhibition of Colorado Loops by Yoshitomo Saito on the International Bridge in Vail Village. The two unique cast bronze sculptures will be on loan to AIPP for this exhibition through September 30.
Yoshitomo Saito is a multitalented and award winning artist who was born in 1958 in Tokyo, Japan. Saito came to the United States in 1983 to study American studio glass art at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. He then moved to the Bay Area to attend California College of the Arts in Oakland. There he studied glass under Marvin Lipofsky and sculpture under Dennis Leon and Linda Fleming. He began using bronze during this period and received his MFA in Sculpture with High Distinction in 1987. In 2006, the artist moved to Colorado in search of new and affordable lifestyle to work as a fully engaged independent artist.
Saito now operates his private studio foundry at Ironton Studios in RiNo Art District of Denver. He actively exhibits his work in both group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States and is in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco: M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, CA; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; Hawaii State Foundation of Cultures and Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii; For-Site Foundation, Nevada City/San Francisco, California; and California College of the Arts, Oakland/San Francisco, CA.
Saito describes the sculptures, “The Colorado Loop is a series of sculpture constituted of looping bronze branches creating simple interlocking rings of lines. Each piece was welded spontaneously without knowing the precise outcome, mimicking the gestural purity of the art of Japanese Enso painters perfecting a one-stroke circle. This sculpture also can invoke the “old West” images of a lasso being used to do rope tricks.”
For more information about Yoshitomo’s Colorado Loops which are available for purchase and related events around this temporary exhibition in Vail visit www.artinvail.com or contact Molly Eppard, AIPP Coordinator at 970-479-2344. A portion of sales proceeds will go towards funding future AIPP programs and exhibitions.