Born in 1969, Japanese artist Tomoo Gokita has only recently gained recognition among the art-world elite. The Tokyo-based, self-taught artist began his career with ink and charcoal drawings, but has transitioned to painting in recent years. In both media, his work engages a conceptual interest in the distortion of the beautiful while grappling with the tension between abstraction and representation.

Gokita's 2006 New York solo debut at ATM Gallery comprised a range of canvases and works on paper, including charcoal drawing Mud Mayhem, which depicts a catfight between two buxom women. However, the artist undercut the scene's sleazy eroticism with a monochromatic palette and cartoonish postures, casting one woman's expression of anguish and rage in an absurdly stiff grimace. In the same exhibition, pure abstractions such as Multinational Corporations offered undulating visions of bulbous, organic forms.

The following year, Gokita enjoyed a major show of mostly black-and-white gouache paintings at LA's Honor Fraser. The shift in medium certainly expanded the artist's visual range, if not his chosen themes. Working with broad brushes and persistent grayscale shading, Gokita endowed his subjects with crudely sculptural contours, rendering faces and hourglass figures in blocky, gestural strokes.

The artist continues to refine his approach; in the new work Caroline, he portrays a woman sitting in front of a vague ocean landscape, one hand provocatively draped between her thighs. He deftly shadows the woman's deep cleavage, but supplants her face with thick bands of paint. As in John Currin's paintings, Gokita's contorted portraits — with their stark gradients, geometric shapes, and disfigurations — dismantle an idealized pinup aesthetic.

While the artist's Honor Fraser exhibition signaled a decisive stylistic break for him, it was Gokita's one-man show this past April at Taka Ishii Gallery, in his hometown of Tokyo, that cemented his reputation as one of Japan's most exciting working artists.

-Adam Eaker