Tomoo Gokita

Tomoo Gokita was born in 1969 in Tokyo, Japan, and continues to live and work there. In 1988 he briefly enrolled in an unnamed local art college in Tokyo to study drawing and oil painting, but left after about two years without completing a degree. He then worked through the late 1980s and 1990s as a graphic designer and illustrator, producing flyers for nightclubs and covers for records and CDs, before returning more fully to drawing and painting in the mid 1990s.

Gokita's mature paintings are built from found source material, vintage magazines, film stills, pornography, and postcards, rendered almost entirely in grayscale and combining passages of abstract brushwork with deformed or obliterated faces. His profile grew through solo exhibitions at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles and Mary Boone Gallery in New York during the 2010s, a major survey, The Great Circus, at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in 2014, and PEEKABOO at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2018. In 2021, Get Down at Dallas Contemporary became his first North American museum exhibition. He has continued to show regularly with Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo, MASSIMODECARLO across its international locations, and Petzel in New York.

Gokita's work is consistently framed around the psychological effect of erasure and displacement, faces sanded down, blurred, or replaced entirely, drawn from a visual vocabulary of vintage advertising, pin ups, and film stills. Curatorial writing around his major surveys, including The Great Circus at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art and PEEKABOO at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, has tended to treat his grayscale palette and commercial design background not as limitations but as the source of the work's uncanny, mass media inflected tone.

Public market data on Gokita is uneven. MutualArt reports a realized auction high of roughly USD 1,076,000 for a painting, a figure that has not been superseded in any source reviewed as of mid 2026, but the specific work, auction house, sale location, and exact date behind that figure are not disclosed in the open summaries available and could not be independently confirmed for this profile. Artsy corroborates this only in general terms, noting that his work has sold for seven figures on the secondary market. Other results carry more detail: a gallery social media post reported that the painting Club Mature sold for about USD 807,000 in New York around November 2018, though the exact sale date and auction house were not stated in that source, and Phillips' own auction results list the painting Duet #1 selling for USD 152,400 at Phillips New York, in a sale consistent with 16 May 2019. MutualArt separately cites a realized price of USD 68,750 for works on paper. Taken together, this points to an active but still developing secondary market with a wide spread between routine works on paper and the small number of major paintings that have driven the top reported results.

No catalogue raisonne has been identified for Gokita, and buyers should verify individual works through his representing galleries, MASSIMODECARLO, Taka Ishii Gallery, and Petzel, rather than relying on auction house cataloguing alone. His auction results vary enormously by medium and period, from a few tens of thousands of dollars for some works on paper to roughly seven figures for the rare top painting result reported by market aggregators, so any single comparable should be read with real caution rather than treated as representative. Museum exposure, including a 2014 survey in Japan and a 2021 debut North American museum exhibition at Dallas Contemporary, has been building steadily, but this profile could not independently confirm that any specific museum holds his work in its permanent collection, and that claim should not be assumed absent further documentation.