Tomoo Gokita - New Now: The Katayama Collection New York Tuesday, September 19, 2017 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    Tokyo, Taka Ishii Gallery, Tomoo Gokita, April 1 – 26, 2008
    Sakura, Kawamura DIC Memorial Museum of Art, Tomoo Gokita: The Great Circus, August 31 – December 24, 2014, cat. no. 18, n.p. (illustrated)
    Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, The Encyclopedia of Masamichi Katayama "Life is hard... Let's go shopping.", April 8 - June 25, 2017, cat. no. 79, p. 83 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    With a background in graphic illustration, Tomoo Gokita brings a level of animation to his paintings, rendered in black and white gouache. Having debuted at Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo the year of its creation in 2008, Gokita’s General Emotionality is a stunning example of the artist’s archetypal figures. A large-scale portrait, the painting features a central female figure whose face is obliterated with Neo-Expressionist like abstraction. The figure’s head and shoulders are rendered almost structurally, with extreme lights and darks standing in stark contrast in a sea of grey-scale monochrome. It is precisely this faithfulness to monochrome illustration that makes Gokita’s paintings so unique. As described in the release accompanying the 2008 exhibition, Gokita’s paintings are “graphic re-presentations of paintings… as much ‘about’ the range of possibilities inherent in varying shades of black and white, and the material flatness and contrastingly sharp tones resulting from gouache applied to canvas” (Tomoo Gokita, Taka Ishii Gallery, April 1 – 26, 2008, online). The present work was also exhibited at the artist’s celebrated retrospective The Great Circus which took place in 2014 at the Kawamura DIC Memorial Museum of Art in Sakura.

14

General Emotionality

signed, titled and dated ""General Emotionality" Tomoo Gokita '08" on the reverse
gouache on canvas
76 3/8 x 63 3/4 in. (194 x 162 cm.)
Executed in 2008.

Estimate
$40,000 - 60,000 

Sold for $181,250

Contact Specialist
Rebekah Bowling
Head of Sale
New York
+ 1 212 940 1250

New Now: The Katayama Collection

New York Auction 19 September 2017