Overview

Over the last two decades, German-born, California-based artist Kota Ezawa has investigated iconic, historical moments and events through a collage and animation practice he refers to as “video archaeology.” With their signature pared-down style, the imagery used in Ezawa’s lightboxes, videos, and works on paper are sampled from diverse social and cultural events such as NFL football players taking a knee to protest police violence and, in the case of this exhibition, the theft of significant works of art. 

For the exhibition The Crime of Art, Ezawa has produced a series of lightboxes that reproduce stolen artworks, and two video animations that explore museum heists both real—featuring closed-circuit video footage from the famed Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft in 1990 in which masterpieces by Degas, Manet, Rembrandt, and Vermeer were stolen, and fictional—extracting clips from such iconic films as Thomas Crown Affair (1999) and How to Steal a Million (1966). In the case of the lightboxes, reproducing these works at their original scale using the artist's reductive approach, Ezawa felt “compelled to produce an exhibition dealing with ‘stolen artworks’ because my own process could be regarded as a form of image theft.”

Ezawa received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995 and an MFA from Stanford University in 2003. He has had solo exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia (2015), the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York (2013), the Vancouver Art Gallery’s outdoor exhibition space Offsite (2012), and the Hayward Gallery Project Space in London (2007). His work is included in collections such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York;  and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; among others. Ezawa lives and works in Oakland, California. 

Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art was organized by SITE Santa Fe with the Mead Art Museum.