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Kota Ezawa

b. 1969 in Cologne, Germany; Lives and works in Oakland, CA

Kota Ezawa
Kota Ezawa

BIOGRAPHY

Kota Ezawa (b. 1969 Cologne, Germany) is best known for his light-boxes, works on paper and animations that make use of found images, video, and film to comment on contemporary culture, appropriation, and historical events. Described by the artist himself as “moving paintings,” Ezawa’s works serve as conduits of events for both history and pop culture, translating them into personal memories and experiences. His works have the ability to transcend the specificity of the image into a more universal realm by reducing the forms and content to their most basic elements.

“Over the past 15 years I developed a style of drawing where I manually trace over existing films, videos, photographs and paintings,” Ezawa explained. “The process has changed gradually. My early drawings were very reduced and minimal. Over time they have become more elaborate. In a way, I’m creating some kind of ghost image of the original. I found that these ghost images emit some kind of power that I’m trying to tap into.”

Ezawa’s imagery is characterized by stylized characters and landscapes, flat planes of color, and geometric forms. His films and slideshows play with ideas of appropriation and originality, asking what it means to document an event, how one can be original in an age saturated by images and information, and what the terms of appropriation are in a time in which aesthetic borrowing is a part of everyday online life. His thought-provoking works reimagine important events and significant artworks in order to raise probing questions about their meaning, and explore their impact on and relevance to our current cultural climate. His first major project Simpson Verdict (2002) is an animated video condensing the denouement of O.J. Simpson’s historic trial into a compelling, muted choreography of nervous gestures and tics. His later Crime of Art series (2017), was inspired by the thirteen masterpieces stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. The works Ezawa produced in response to this loss are animation-style synopses of the original works, drawn on glowing light box transparencies. Ezawa’s went on to create his National Anthem series (2019) in reaction to national protests staged by NFL teams kneeling in response to police brutality in the United States. These works were first exhibited at the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

Long interested in the cultural weight of photography, Ezawa questions the medium’s validity as a mediator of actual events and experiences by reducing complex visual information to its most essential, two-dimensional elements.

He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the San Francisco Art Institute before getting his M.F.A. from Stanford University. He lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Ezawa has received a number of fellowships, awards, grants, and residencies, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2003; a SECA Art Award in 2006 and a Eureka Fellowship in 2010.

In 2019, Ezawa’s work was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in 2017, he was featured in the traveling exhibition Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything, organized by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. His work has also been included in solo and group exhibitions at the Everson Museum of Art, NY (2023); Manetti Shrem Museum, CA (2022); Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI (2021); University of Texas, Austin, TX (2021); The Georgia Museum of Art, GA (2021); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2020); Southbank Centre, UK (2020); Margulies Collection (2020); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2020); Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL (2019); Jewish Museum, NY (2019); Galerie der Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Germany (2018); SITE Santa Fe, NM (2017); Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Spain (2017); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2016); Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2015); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2015); J. Paul Getty Museum, CA (2014); Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY (2013); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CA (2012); Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (2012); and the St. Louis Art Museum, MO (2008), among others.

Ezawa’s work is in included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; Collection Neuflize Vie, France; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Israel Museum, Israel; J. Paul Getty Museum, CA; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany; Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany; Margulies Collection, FL; Mead Art Museum, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art, IL; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The National Gallery of Victoria, Australia; New York Public Library, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, CT; Princeton University Art Museum, NJ; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, CT, among others.

VIDEO

Publications

Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art

with contributions by Irene Hofmann, Niko Vicario, and Jordan Kantor

112 pages

Radius Books, Santa Fe, 2017