TOMOO GOKITA
Out Of Sight
10 September to 29 October 2016
On 10 September 2016, Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Chelsea location Out Of Sight, an exhibition of new paintings by TOMOO GOKITA.
Tomoo Gokita’s distinctive paintings – each rendered in a lush range of black, gray, and white tones – evoke a fictional world of crooners and starlets, gangsters and gun molls, bimbos and honchos. Gokita’s choice of a colorless palette enforces the sense that his images derive from retro films or photographs, although, with their character-driven narrative and shallow space, they also embrace the sensibility of contemporary Japanese comics (manga) or graphic novels (gekiga).
Equally compelling as the subjects of his paintings is the way Gokita manipulates paint to achieve an array of visual effects. A glimpse of clothing or incidental background object may be rendered with sharply observed patterning and texture, while a face – usually our foundation for assessing an individual – is often no more than a haze of smeared paint. By obscuring these figures’ particular features and expressions, Gokita turns his cast into masked archetypes, redoubling their origin in memory, imagination, and fantasy.
Tomoo Gokita was born in 1969 in Tokyo, Japan, where he continues to live and work. In 2014, the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura, Japan, organized a major survey of his work. This will be his second solo show with Mary Boone Gallery.
The exhibition, at 541 West 24 Street, is on view through 29 October 2016. For further information, please contact Ron Warren at the Gallery, or visit our website www.maryboonegallery.com.
