Tomoo Gokita - 20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Day Sale Hong Kong Sunday, November 25, 2018 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galerie Aliceday, Brussels
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    Brussels, Galerie Aliceday, Funland, 11 September - 23 October 2010

  • Catalogue Essay

    Working almost exclusively in black and white, Tokyo born artist Gokita is a master manipulator of monotone. He finesses tonal ranges and ups contrasts to produce lurid grayscale pieces, often sourcing imagery from popular culture to create noir portraits of pin-up girls, cowboys, and gangsters, amongst others. His subjects, taken from film, television, advertising and pornography, typically have their faces and parts of their bodies obliterated by splashes, twists and smudges of paint. “Painting, to me, is like sports” (Elaine Ng, ‘One Thousand Shades of Gray: Tomoo Gokita’ in Art Asia Pacific, Jul-Aug 2015), Gokita says in regards to his intuitive approach. Instead of methodically planning out a composition, Gokita allows forms and motifs to lead his creative process- taking particular inspiration from social archetypes and contemporary personae.

    Having shown at a few galleries in Tokyo, Gokita’s career breakthrough came in 2005 when New York-based artist Taylor McKimens discovered a book of his work Lingerie Wrestling (2000) in the New Museum bookshop and invited him to take part in Stranger Town, a group show at Dinter Fine Art in New York. The exhibition presented eight American and Japanese artists whose work traversed painting, comics, illustration and music. Following the success of the exhibition, many galleries approached him and Gokita started exhibiting solo shows in New York’s ATM Gallery, Tokyo’s Taka Ishii Gallery and Los Angeles’ Honor Fraser Gallery. Portrait of an Insomniac Junior-High Student was included in the first European solo show for the artist at Aliceday gallery in Brussels in 2010. Titled Funland, the exhibition consisted of hundreds of drawings and a dozen of paintings- the present work one of the only two close-up portraits that were exhibited.

    In Portrait of an Insomniac Junior-High Student, Gokita tackles one of the most representative and iconic subjects of contemporary Japanese society: the student. Presented in the format of a school ID or yearbook photo, a Japanese boy is outlined by a sliver of white negative space. Gokita removes the typifying features of a face and replaces them with terse, painterly gestures. Subtle shifts in tonality form the murky shadow of a nose, and two downward curving black strokes emerge in place of eyes and eyebrows. The viewer is given the framework of a familiar subject but denied the assurance of knowing his identity. There is an undeniable sense of illumination, but shadows and highlights do not appear from any logically perceivable source of light, resulting in a colourless fluorescence perhaps describable as neo-chiaroscuro. In the creation of the portrait, with clean crisp lines of the collar of his school uniform juxtaposed by a bold, black, bowl-cut hairstyle, Gokita takes an iconographic archetype, wipes out his face and abstracts it— a unique characteristic that separates his earlier body of works up until 2015 to more recent ones when he progressed to painting facial features.

    The artist’s allegiance to monotone quickly became a trademark. The lack of colour in his paintings provides for more direct and simple communication, allowing other formal qualities to shine. Some critics have labelled his work post-conceptual, due to its lack of readily visible concept or idea. Yet quite precisely, the fantastical dreamscape energy of Gokita’s works is thanks to his focus on formal techniques, fluidly merging neo-expressionist gestures, surrealist aesthetics, and pop graphics to create direct, yet emotionally complex portraits.

19

Portrait of an Insomniac Junior-High Student

2010
signed, titled and dated '"Portrait of an Insomniac Junior-High Student" Tomoo Gokita, 2010' on the reverse
acrylic and gouache on linen
80.1 x 80.1 cm. (31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in.)
Executed in 2010.

Estimate
HK$400,000 - 600,000 
€45,000-67,500
$51,300-76,900

Sold for HK$1,500,000

Contact Specialist
Jonathan Crockett
Deputy Chairman, Asia and Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, Asia
+852 2318 2023

Isaure de Viel Castel
Head of Department
+852 2318 2011

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Specialist, Head of Day Sale
+852 2318 2026

20th Century & Contemporary Art & Design Day Sale

Hong Kong Auction 26 November 2018