Kota Ezawa | The Thingness Of An Object

(openPR) FELDBUSCHWIESNER is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by artist Kota Ezawa.
Memory is the driving force behind Ezawa's work, which involves recreating images from popular culture and collective history.
His chosen mediums range from digital animation and lightboxes to collage, prints, and sculpture. For Ezawa, images can have a life of their own just as much as the people and places they depict. He translates iconic moments from film, the media and art history into images and animated videos that are reminiscent of Warhol and Lichtenstein pop art.
His characteristic style involves reducing the physical and psychological expression of the protagonist to a minimum. For his videos, Kota Ezawa reconstructs each selected scene from his source material in a time-consuming digital collage of silhouettes.
These manually produced videos possess a highly distinctive style that, for Ezawa, has its roots in painting. Through these techniques, Kota Ezawa reproduces the lost aura of well-known media images and explores the relationship between reality and reproduction.

Kota Ezawa was born in 1969 in Cologne and currently lives and works in Berlin and San Francisco. He is associate professor of film and fine arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Ezawa studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and was a Master's student in the class of Nam June Paik in 1995. He continued his studies at the San Francisco Institute of Art and went on to obtain an MFA at Stanford University in 2003. His work has been displayed in solo exhibitions at 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). He has also participated in a number of group exhibitions, including at the Columbus Museum of Art (2011), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2005), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006), and the Whitney Biennial (2006). Ezawa's work has earned him a number of awards and accolades, including the SECA Art Award of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006) and a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation (2010).