Tomoo Gokita Be Just Like Family, 2015. This work is on view in London from Friday 15 February before going under the hammer in New York this spring.
Tokyo-born artist Tomoo Gokita is a master of monotone: his geometric forms in a striking grayscale palette have become almost instantly recognizable. Coming to auction this May in our New York 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, Be Just Like Family is an enthralling and uncanny painting in gouache acrylic.
Gokita upends the tradition of group portraiture with inventive wit by appropriating the style of a conventional photograph. Working in monochromatic tones, he establishes dramatic chiaroscuro and subtle gradations of modeling with light and shade, while introducing elements of abstraction that efface his subjects by transforming and obscuring their faces, clothing and bodies. Rearranging their features with nonrepresentational passages of meticulously defined tones and textures, Gokita throws into relief questions of representation and identity.
There's nothing haphazard — not even an accidental drip.
Tomoo Gokita Sham Marriage, 2013. This work will be offered in our London 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 7 March 2019.
Coming to auction even sooner, Sham Marriage, 2013, is an earlier portrait of two figures that exudes the same mystery and wit that have come to define the artist's highly graphic oeuvre. Rendered with amalgamated zigzags and congruous angles, the painting delineates the anonymous silhouettes of a man and a woman over a subtle gradation of black and grey. Precisely achieved with acrylic gouache and charcoal on linen, the composition bathes in a textural complexity that is reflective of Gokita's rigorous practice, whereby, as the artist was quoted in The Japan Times in 2014, "there's nothing haphazard — not even an accidental drip."
Spanning Cubism, Surrealism, Pop art and mass media, Sham Marriage's multifarious visual references are emblematic of the artist's ability to engage in dialogue with distinctive currents of image production. Indeed he sources from an amalgamation of mainstream television, vintage album covers and soft-core erotic magazines to transform the distorted bodily archetypes that pervade popular media into abstract, preternatural incarnations.
Currently on view in our Hong Kong galleries: Tomoo Gokita Embrace, 2017. This work will be offered in our Hong Kong 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale in May 2019.
Operating within a larger art historical tradition of hybrid representation, Gokita explores the indistinct border that separates realism from abstraction. Like Gerhard Richter's photorealist canvases made in the late 1960s, Gokita's idiosyncratic work builds upon existing imagery and subsequently undergoes intentional camouflage through masterful manipulation of paint.