While Tomoo Gokita first gained notoriety in 2005 for his monochromatic palette and grayscale figurative paintings, his latest works illustrate a major departure for his practice. Launching into a vast world of vibrant pastels, the artist presented at Dallas Contemporary familiar motifs of pin-up models, female wrestlers and familial portraiture alongside mundane symbols embedded in our current reality that now hedge on absurdism in the wake of the past year’s events.

This richly illustrated volume offers the occasion to discover Gokita’s latest body of work, featuring his newest large-scale paintings and a number of never-before-seen works made under lockdown during the pandemic. From the beginning of his career as an artist, his paintings and pencil and ink drawings have demonstrated a remarkable range of style, seamlessly subverting the dichotomy of abstraction and figuration to produce a practice of an unmistakable and psychological character.