Peekaboo

Peekaboo collects the monochrome paintings from Tomoo Gokita's 2018 exhibition of the same name at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, a body of work built entirely around surprise and withheld information.

Published by 888 Books in Tokyo, the book reproduces canvases worked in acrylic gouache in Gokita's collage-like manner, black, white and grey passages built up and scraped back until faces and figures blur toward abstraction. The subjects continue his long engagement with 1960s and 1970s American counterculture and underground magazines, filtered through pulp illustration and pin-up photography rather than reproduced directly.

Gokita (born 1969, Tokyo) trained as a graphic designer before turning to painting, and has shown with Blum and Taka Ishii Gallery among others. Peekaboo extends the vocabulary of erasure and disguise that runs through his work, in which recognisable source imagery is worked over until only a residue of gesture and expression remains.