Kota Ezawa (b. 1969 Cologne, Germany) visually transforms imagery he mines from the news, the history of art, photography, film, and popular culture in his acclaimed video animations, light boxes, murals, sculptures, watercolors, and other artworks. His process of translating primarily charged depictions – court proceedings from the OJ Simpson trial, footage of NFL players kneeling in protest during the National Anthem, artworks stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, or iconic images from the history of photography, for example – from one visual form to another, is an inquiry, for the artist and viewer alike, into our cultural consciousness shaped by images.
Remaining faithful to the content of the original, Ezawa begins by manually drawing the source image, film, or footage in his distinctive graphic style which straddles abstraction and representation. Converting elements into geometric shapes, and using unmodulated colors and flattened compositions which connote color field painting, or equally, cartoon animations, he purposefully reduces visual details so that the resulting images are read more intuitively than real-world representations. These drawings can become videos, light boxes, paper cutouts, sculptures, etc.– the artist carefully considers the viewing experience, seeking a marked polarity between the format of the original and his artwork rendition. Encountered in their translated form, Ezawa’s remakes offer a meditation rather than commentary on his chosen subject matter. Conceptually, his artworks act as a mirror; they will reflect the symbolic power of his source imagery. The myriad associations and responses conjured by and imposed on Ezawa's recreations arise from the viewer having to contend with the personal, cultural, and historical relevance of the original event. His artworks can agitate, provoke by revealing what remains, what is brought to the fore when an image representing a memorable subject, or historical moment, is considered anew, in an altogether different visual language.
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Kota Ezawa’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, CA; SITE Santa Fe, NM; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH. Group exhibitions include: Last Year in Marienbad: A Film as Art, Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany; Screen Play: Life in an Animated World, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Out of the Ordinary, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and After Photoshop, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Ezawa participated in the Whitney Biennial in 2019 and the Shanghai Biennale in 2004.
He has produced site-specific public artworks for the University of California San Francisco, Mission Bay Campus; Madison Square Park, New York; San Francisco International Airport, California; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California; and the Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, Vancouver, Canada, as well as other locations. His work is in the collections of institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. A recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, a SECA Art Award, and a Eureka Fellowship, Ezawa studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Stanford University. The artist lives and works in Oakland, CA.