Tomoo Gokita in HYPEBEAST

28 January 2018

Interview with Nirvana Garreffa The Surreal Paintings of Tomoo Gokita Inspired by Vintage Playboys on HYPEBEAST.COM.

Where traditional art has spent hundreds of years coming to a refined balance of aesthetic and concept, conceptual art emerged as a sort of protest. It placed concept above all, with a major disregard for material and appearance. Think Marcel Duchamp and Jenny Holzer.

Tomoo Gokita’s art however, is unlike either of these.

Since labels help people understand the things they’re looking at, critics have called Gokita’s work Post-Conceptual — perhaps the most suiting genre since his paintings have no attributed meaning, aim to change no one’s minds about anything, and are not intended to make the viewers feel any particular way. This is something the artist has been entirely honest in acknowledging. When asked about it, he’ll tell you “people should be able to look at the work and feel or think whatever they like about it.”...

Tomoo Gokita in Shikimei

November 2016

Interview with Tomoo Gokita in Shikimei.

TOMOO GOKITA in The New York Times

20 October 2016

Review by Roberta Smith in The New York Times.

Tomoo Gokita, a polymath of drawing mediums and styles, turned to painting in 2005, basing his images on found photographs and working exclusively in the sharp whites, velvety blacks and myriad grays of gouache. They pack an unsettling visual punch.

In “Out of Sight,” at Mary Boone, the paintings’ neon glow and louche, vintage feel evoke the work of the Pop outlier Ed Paschke (1939-2004). Subjects include a pair of Playboy bunnies; nuclear families; couples out for the evening; a send-up of Manet’s “Olympia”; and “Madam,” a woman in a strapless, kaleidoscopically patterned cocktail dress. Faces are often disturbingly “out of sight,” masked with shaded curved visors suggestive of astronauts’ gear. They dehumanize, yet real emotions seep around their edges...

Tomoo Gokita in Collaboration with Stüssy

March 2016

Collaboration with Stüssy for Spring 2016 Artist Series Collection.

It was about a year and half ago when I made the trip out to Tomoo’s studio. We were picked up from our hotel and drove for about thirty minutes from Shibuya, to an area that must have been Tokyo’s version of a suburb. I’d been a fan of Tomoo’s work for some time, so I was psyched to finally meet him. I didn’t really know what to expect. There’s a certain cinematic feel to Tomoo’s work: dark and slightly twisted. It always reminded me of a David Lynch films, or the Twilight Zone. Mainly black and white and super moody, but the subject matter is often pin up girls and wrestlers. The mixture of those things is what I was drawn to. Highs and lows...

Tomoo Gokita at Bill Brady Gallery

30 November 2015 to January 2016

Solo exhibition Damage Control at Bill Brady Gallery, Miami, Florida.

Tokyo-based Tomoo Gokita implements a black and white palette and acrylic gouache create uniquely even surfaces, which are beautiful and disquieting, yet incredibly seductive to the viewer. Gokita continues his monochromatic series that explores the traditional portrait format on a range of scales, using source material from vintage postcards, magazines, found photos, and classic film stills. His distinctive greyscale aesthetic combines deft tonal modeling of figures with a material flatness, both alluding to and obscuring characters appropriated from western popular culture and marginal countercultural sources...

Tomoo Gokita at the Newcomb Art Museum

9 September 2015 to 3 January 2016

Included in group exhibition A Shared Space: KAWS, Karl Wirsum, and Tomoo Gokita, at the Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

While the three artists’ works in this exhibition have few formal associations, KAWS as the collector, sees commonalities underlying Wirsum’s whimsical and brightly colored figures, Gokita’s sleek grayscale faceless portraits, and his own meticulous, brightly-colored paintings. Ramirez-Montagut explains, “This exhibition is a lyrical exercise in exploring the works’ points of contact as perceived by KAWS, despite their seeming dissimilarities. The viewer comes to see these artists’ mutual appreciation for popular culture, irreverent iconographies, humor, and impeccable craftsmanship together with a shared use of strong graphic forms that evoke visceral reactions.”...

Tomoo Gokita in Art Asia Pacific

July-August 2015

Feature article by Elaine W. Ng Tomoo Gokita: One Thousand Shades of Gray in Art Asia Pacific.

Tomoo Gokita is an outsider among Tokyo art insiders. With his boyish charm, he is sociable yet reticent. He regularly declares his love for beer and professional wrestling—particularly the 1976 match between Japan’s Antonio Inoki and American champion boxer Muhammad Ali. He studies record-album covers rather than art catalogs. So when the easygoing, 46-year-old painter of abstract-figurative canvases—more appreciated in the indie music and zine subcultures than by Tokyo-based curators and gallerists—was given a retrospective in August 2014, “The Great Circus,” at the prestigious Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, an hour’s train ride southeast of Tokyo, it caught Japan’s art community by surprise...

Tomoo Gokita at Honor Fraser Gallery

11 April to 16 May 2015

Solo exhibition Bésame Mucho at Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, California.

On view will be new works by Tokyo-based Tomoo Gokita, who is acclaimed for his black and white gouache canvases that incorporate exceptional draftsmanship with surreal imagery. Gokita continues his monochromatic series that explores the traditional portrait format on a range of scales, using source material from vintage postcards, magazines, found photos, and classic film stills. With a celebrated career in illustration and graphic design, Gokita first rose to prominence after creating a series of newsprint books. In 2005, he turned to painting, developing a distinctive greyscale aesthetic that combines deft tonal modeling of figures with a material flatness, both alluding to and obscuring characters appropriated from western popular culture and marginal countercultural sources. Alongside Gokita's intimate portraits of individuals, this exhibition will feature large-scale group compositions that are an evolution in the artist's oeuvre...