Kota Ezawa

Christopher Grimes Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Kota Ezawa, his third with the gallery. At the heart of the exhibition will be the new multi-channel animated film, The Crime of Art, in which Ezawa re-creates – in his distinctive flattened, distilled style – scenes from Hollywood art heist films, among them The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), How to Steal a Million, Topkapi, and Entrapment. The 3-screen installation functions like a cinematic “exquisite corpse” in which one screen continues the narrative thread where the previous screen leaves off. In contrast to a Hollywood film, this animation has no beginning and no end.

Ezawa notes: “I like to think of crime in this work not as a mystery that needs to be resolved but as a snake that bites its own tail.”

Ezawa will also present a selection of light boxes that further his investigations into stolen works of art, including to-scale recreations of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, versions of which were stolen in 1994 and 2004, and Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which was appropriated by the Nazi regime is 1938 and was famously repatriated to the Bloch-Bauer family in 2006.

Copies of Ezawa's new monograph, The Crime of Art, which surveys Ezawa's career using crime as a topical lens, will be available for purchase at the opening reception.

Kota Ezawa lives and works in Oakland, California. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM (2017); Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA (2017); Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2015); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2013); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2013); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2009); Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, England (2007); and Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2006). Ezawa’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, among others.