Known for his uncanny approach to figuration, Gokita has long explored the tension between familiarity and distortion in his psychologically charged compositions. Working in both monochrome and vibrant colors, he has built a distinctive visual language that merges portraiture, abstraction, and cultural memory. Early works often originated from found imagery – vintage magazines and old newspapers – serving as visual springboards that he would intuitively warp and reimagine through his tactile process of painting.

In recent years, however, Gokita has shifted his practice inward. No longer relying on pre-existing media, he channels his subjects from memory and subconscious invention. The resulting forms – part-human, part-fantastical – occupy a liminal space between reality and dream. His characters now take shape through layers of erasure and reinvention. This iterative approach allows each figure to exist as a collision of gestures, influences, and emotional states, invoking artists from Picasso to Guston while conjuring the spectral strangeness of sci-fi cinema and surrealist dreamscapes.  With NAKED, Gokita turns his attention to the trope of the female nude, reframing a historically overdetermined subject with acidic irreverence and grotesque beauty. In these paintings, surrealist bodies bristle with defiant physicality, eschewing objectification in favor of confrontational agency.

Tomoo Gokita (b. 1969, Tokyo, Japan) lives and works in Tokyo. Major recent museum solo exhibitions include GUMBO at ICA Milano, Milan, Italy (2024); Get Down at Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX (2021); PEEKABOO at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2018), and a retrospective, THE GREAT CIRCUS, at Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Sakura, Japan (2014). His work has also been featured in notable surveys such as Next Door, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2023); Lynchland: Genre, Auteurism and a Fish in the Percolator, curated by Steven Wolkoff and Tom Dunn, Torrance Museum of Art, Torrance, CA (2022); Wonderful My Art, Kawaguchiko Museum of Art, Yamanashi, Japan (2013); The Unseen Relationship: Form and Abstraction, Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Sakura, Japan (2012); Gateway: Japan, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2011); New York Minute, Macro Future Museum, Rome, Italy (2009); and Collected Visions, Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2009). Gokita’s work is included in institutional collections such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; the Miyanomori Museum of Art, Sapporo, Japan; the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX; and the X Museum, Beijing, China.