Tomoo Gokita
Japanese, b. 1969
Tomoo Gokita is best known for his monochrome and grayscale renderings of mass-media archetypes—he obscures their faces, giving an uncanny aura to his familiar silhouettes. Gokita’s paintings and drawings take inspiration from vintage magazines, film stills, pornography, and postcards. The artist often places faceless pinup girls and wrestlers in indeterminate gray fields and against plain white pages, while other works feature free-flowing forms that evoke Surrealist canvases. Gokita has exhibited in New York, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles, and has participated in solo shows at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art. His work has sold for seven figures on the secondary market and belongs in the collections of the High Museum of Art, X Museum, the Marciano Art Foundation, and the Oketa Collection.




