Kota Ezawa at Independent New York

Kota Ezawa

Installation view, Independent New York, 2024

RYAN LEE and Fraenkel Gallery are pleased to present a joint exhibition of work by Kota Ezawa at this year’s Independent New York, featuring light-boxes, collage, watercolor, sculpture, and animations based on found imagery from contemporary culture and art history.

Kota Ezawa

The Grand Princess (excerpt), 2024

Single channel video with wall vinyl installation

RT 00:02:57

Edition of 5, plus 2AP

This exhibition marks the debut of Grand Princess, incorporating video animation and a vinyl wall installation. The piece depicts the arrival of a cruise ship into the San Francisco Bay in March 2020, carrying some of the first known American cases of COVID-19. Set against the picturesque landscape, the film distills these images into their most elemental forms, evoking the feelings of anxiety and alienation that marked the coming of a global pandemic.

This lightbox depicts a version of Rembrandt’s 1633 painting A Lady and Gentleman in Black, one of 13 works of art stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in a brazen 1990 theft. Ezawa’s series The Crime of Art chronicles real and fictional museum heists and acts of art vandalism, calling attention to his own use of appropriated images while recreating artworks that may exist only as a kind of collective memory.

Kota Ezawa

A Lady and Gentleman in Black, 2015

Transparency in lightbox

52 x 43 inches (132.1 x 109.2 cm)

Edition of 5

Unlike many of Ezawa’s works, there is no specific reference image for Hand Vote, a painted plywood sculpture that depicts rows of men and women with raised hands. For Ezawa, the sculpture doesn’t address a particular election, but depicts an act that is “fundamental to the idea of democracy,” he has said.

Ezawa depicts John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their 1969 “bed-in”, in which the couple spoke with the press from their hotel room as a protest against the Vietnam War. The collage builds on Ezawa’s 2004 animation Lennon Sontag Beuys, which paired a stylized clip of Lennon and Ono with recordings of Susan Sontag and Joseph Beuys, as each talk about art in the context of social change.

Kota Ezawa

Lennon, 2011

Paper collage

9 3/8 x 11 5/8 inches (23.8 x 29.5 cm)

Kota Ezawa

Installation view, Independent New York, 2024

To view more highlights from the fair, click here.