Tomoo Gokita “Beauty”

Mary Boone Gallery (Midtown)

This event has ended.

From his early work in graphic design and artist books, Tomoo Gokita evolved a distinctive manner of painting that incorporated a wide variety of brush marks and a range of shades between black and white. His raffish subjects seemed to have been lifted from reproductions in bygone detective novels, Hollywood tabloids, and wanted posters. In Mature, a new series of portrait paintings exhibited here, Gokita depicts women “of a certain age” who appear to have posed for a fetish magazine. Without the distortions and grotesquerie of his earlier works, Gokita portrays these enigmatic characters naturalistically as unconventional objects of desire, treating his subjects with obvious contemplation and admiration.

Gokita’s gift of observation is apparent in a surprising new series of Fake Cezanne
paintings. At once Realist homage and Conceptual card trick, these would seem to be faithful renditions of Cezanne still-lifes, yet by rendering the images in lush halftones, Gokita evokes grainy, nostalgic reproductions in vintage art journals rather than original masterpieces.

Tomoo Gokita was born in 1969 in Tokyo, Japan, where he continues to live and work. In 2014, the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in Sakura, Japan, organized a major survey of his work. This will be his third solo exhibition
with Mary Boone Gallery.