Tomoo Gokita’s signature black and white paintings typically draw upon an assortment of distinctive, kitschy pop-culture motifs ranging from cowboys and pin-up girls to Mexican wrestlers. Images appropriated from a variety of sources, including television, advertising and pornographic magazines, are deftly subverted by Gokita’s paintbrush with a series of smudges, distortions and gestures that render the faces and forms of his subjects unrecognisable, yet uncannily familiar. Considered an outsider by the Japanese art establishment, who has struggled to accept his often cryptic use of low-brow cultural imagery and background as a commercial illustrator, Gokita is described as “a polymath of drawing mediums and styles” by the renowned American critic Roberta Smith, whose “undeniably rich” paintings “pack an unsettling visual punch” (Roberta Smith, New York Times, 21 October 2016).

Gokita’s breakthrough came in 2005 when a chance encounter with Gokita’s book Lingerie Wrestling (2000) in a museum shop led to a curator’s invitation to take part in the New York group show “Stranger Town”. Roberta Smith profiled the then-unknown Japanese artist in The New York Times: “One of the show’s high points is the stunning wall devoted to drawings in charcoal, ink or pencil by Tomoo Gokita […] Mr. Gokita’s vocabulary barrels across illustration, pornography, abstraction, children’s drawing, calligraphy and sign-painting, with a perfect control, velvety surfaces and tonal range that makes black-and-white feel like living colour” (Roberta Smith, New York Times, March 9 2005).

Embrace was unveiled at the artist’s third solo show Holy Cow, held at Tokyo’s Taka Ishii Gallery in 2017. Exploiting the same rich visual language characteristic of Gokita’s work, Embrace seemingly brings out a more traditional, even sentimental, side of the artist. The embracing figures draw upon the enduring artistic motif of lovers enfolded in an eternal kiss. Whereas some of Gokita’s depictions of nude women are informed by soft-core erotica (in an interview with Art Asia Pacific he affectionately recalls his open-minded father, a designer working on advertising layouts for Playboy magazine, encouraging him to take a look at the Playboy magazines lying around the family home because “women are beautiful” (Elaine Ng, ‘One Thousand Shades of Gray’ in Art Asia Pacific, July/Aug 2015, online), here Gokita inserts himself firmly in the classical tradition with a nude subject conceivably borrowed from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s masterpiece The Turkish Bath, a refined neoclassical portrait of idealised, submissive beauty. But a playfully subversive streak underpins Embrace, with the lovers’ tangled, amorphous limbs and Mexican wrestling boots injecting a surreal and disarming mix of imagery into the work.

Like in many of his other works, Gokita tantalises the viewer with an emotional tension somewhere between the pull of the familiar and the lure of the otherworldly. This is a theme recurrent not only in his choice of subject, but also medium. When Gokita turned to painting in 2005, he took the decision to favour a palette of black, grey and white, an aesthetic which had been carefully cultivated in his early works on paper and various commercial projects. This decision has over the years led to a mastery of texture, contrast and tone which is demonstrated at its best in Embrace. The immediacy of Gokita’s bold, evocative draftsmanship is tempered by voluptuous monochrome gradations that blur the line between the abstract and the figurative. This invisible brushwork suffuses the surface of the canvas with a startlingly luminous, velvety quality, lending a sublime and rarefied air to the work. Embrace is at once contemporary and timeless, a testament to an artist who continues to defy the conventions of artistic practice today.

Gokita’s work continues to gather critical and artistic acclaim. Today Gokita is represented by several prominent international art galleries, including Blum & Poe (New York), Bill Brady Gallery (Miami), and Taka Ishii Gallery (Tokyo). His work has gained further institutional recognition over the past five years, with important solo museum shows at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art (THE GREAT CIRCUS) in 2014 and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (PEEKABOO) in 2018.