Tomoo Gokita: Naked

BLUM is pleased to present NAKED, an exhibition of new paintings by Tokyo-based artist Tomoo Gokita. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.   
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. Referencing the glamor of Playboy, the weirdness of B-movie aesthetics, and the compositional motifs of Impressionist painting, these nudes are saturated with intense, unsettling color. At once seductive and disquieting, titles such as PEEPING WOMAN (2025), THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB (2025), and THE BALCONY INCIDENT (2025) hint at uncanny and humorous narratives, infusing the work with irony, unease, and a self-assured rejection of conventional beauty.