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Details
- Place where the work was made
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Japan
- Date
- 2018
- Media category
- Painting
- Materials used
- acrylic and gouache on canvas
- Dimensions
- 194.0 x 194.0 x 3.18 cm
- Signature & date
Signed u.r., verso, "Gokita 2018".
- Credit
- Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program by Dr Clinton Ng and Steven Johnston 2023
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 177.2023
- Copyright
- © Tomoo Gokita
- Artist information
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Tomoo Gokita
Works in the collection
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About
Tomoo Gokita began his career as an illustrator and designer in the 1990s. It wasn’t until after 2005 that he began to dedicate his time completely to painting and drawing, inspired by film, vintage pornography magazines (his father worked as a designer for Playboy’s printed advertisements), and Japanese and American subcultures from the 1960s and 1970s.
Gokita is best-known for enigmatic greyscale paintings that depict dream-like scenes and subjects. Distorted faces and bodies, sometimes with features reduced to abstract shapes and cartoonish forms, are hallmarks of his paintings.
Speaking of this practice, Gokita says ‘I am presuming that to deform the human face might be a reaction against my practice of depicting them like crazy when I was young. Probably, I have become tired of depicting faces. Also, I have loved the masked wrestlers of the Mexican Lucha libre and those masks in Africa all this time, and a kind of transformational desire “to hide a face and to become a different character,” which can be symbolised in those masks, may have affected my work. I suppose there exists a certain ghoulish curiosity towards monsters and deformities, too.’
Like many of his portraits, the title of this painting, Daughter of a fraudster, refers to a character-type, variously found by the artist in Hollywood cinema, pulp fiction and other forms of popular culture. In this case, Gokita’s subject is subdued and enigmatic and, much like a Hollywood archetype, she is a surface onto which the viewers project their own thoughts and emotions.
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Places
Where the work was made
Japan
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Exhibition history
Shown in 1 exhibition
Tomoo Gokita, Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, 08 Sep 2018–27 Oct 2018