Tomoo Gokita

Tokyo-based Tomoo Gokita is acclaimed for his black and white gouache canvases that incorporate exceptional draftsmanship with surreal imagery. His monochromatic works explore 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.

In 2014 Gokita was the subject of the large-scale solo exhibition, Tomoo Gokita: The Great Circus at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura, Japan. His work has also been included in such thematic shows as Kawaguchiko Museum of Art in Japan, Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura, Torrance Art Museum in California, Ueno Royal Museum in Tokyo, Macro Future Museum in Rome, and Pera Museum in Istanbul.