Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art

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By using images of stolen art, Ezawa implicates himself in the lineage of theft and the dilemma of ownership, especially in the digital world where the availability of images has made information sampling and manipulation so commonplace that the line between real and fake has been blurred.

— Lita Barrie, Hyperallergic


The Crime of Art brings attention to several of Kota Ezawa’s key projects from 2000 and 2017. Coinciding with a solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, this volume presents photographs and reproductions from the artist’s exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and Amherst, in which the artist featured his lightbox renderings of paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. 

The book also draws connections to other works by Ezawa that contemplate crime. Among them are his animated films The Simpson Verdict (2002) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2005), as well as his ongoing drawing series The History of Photography Remix, which includes hand-drawn recreations of historic crime scene photography.

Limited edition of this book available HERE

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By using images of stolen art, Ezawa implicates himself in the lineage of theft and the dilemma of ownership, especially in the digital world where the availability of images has made information sampling and manipulation so commonplace that the line between real and fake has been blurred.

— Lita Barrie, Hyperallergic


The Crime of Art brings attention to several of Kota Ezawa’s key projects from 2000 and 2017. Coinciding with a solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, this volume presents photographs and reproductions from the artist’s exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and Amherst, in which the artist featured his lightbox renderings of paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. 

The book also draws connections to other works by Ezawa that contemplate crime. Among them are his animated films The Simpson Verdict (2002) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2005), as well as his ongoing drawing series The History of Photography Remix, which includes hand-drawn recreations of historic crime scene photography.

Limited edition of this book available HERE

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Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art
Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art
 

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  • Artwork by Kota Ezawa
    Texts by Irene Hofmann, Jordan Kantor, and Niko Vicario

    Hardcover
    9 x 10.5 inches
    160 pages / 80 images
    Trade ISBN: 9781942185321
    Signed ISBN: 9798890180124

    Co-published with SITE Santa Fe and Mead Art Museum

  • Drawing from media, art history, and popular culture, Kota Ezawa (b. 1969, Cologne, Germany; lives and works in Oakland, CA) investigates the power of certain images, distilling memories of significant historical moments into their basic forms. Using animation, slide projections, lightboxes, paper cut-outs, and collage, Ezawa transforms complex visual information into its most essential elements, creating striking, flattened versions of photographs and artworks that explore the construction of shared experience through images. Fraenkel Gallery began representing Ezawa in 2023, and his first solo exhibition with the gallery took place the following year.

    Ezawa has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, California; SITE Santa Fe; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; and the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri, among others. He participated in the Whitney Biennial 2019 and the Shanghai Biennale 2004. His work is in the collections of institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Art Institute of Chicago; Musée D’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Canada; and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Ezawa received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2004, a SECA Art Award in 2006, and a Eureka Fellowship in 2010.