About Kota Ezawa

Kota Ezawa (* 1969 in Cologne) is a German-Japanese artist living in San Francisco and Berlin. He is known for translating and reinterpreting documentary footage – news, film clips, works by other artists, and images stored in our memory – into watercolour animations. Events of historical significance stand on an equal footing with moments of pop culture. Transposed into two-dimensional, literally flat images, Ezawa’s works condense complex visual information into basic elements. Described by the artist as “animated paintings”, they combine a handicraft aesthetic with visual language borrowed from comics and pop art.

THERISEANDFALLOFTHEBERLINWALL, 2021, video animation, 2:10 min., Ed. 5 +2 AP

Press release

Kota Ezawa – OPUS II
27.10. – 04.12.2021

We are pleased about the third solo exhibition of Kota Ezawa in our gallery.

OPUS is a three-part exhibition project by German/American artist Kota Ezawa on the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall in the context of German history.

In our gallery we show OPUS II, part I of which has already opened at Gallery Ryan Lee in New York. It brings together two different architectural interventions that took place in Germany between 1923 and 1989: the creation and destruction of the groundbreaking installation Merzbau by Kurt Schwitters (built 1923-37; destroyed in 1943) and the Berlin Wall (built in 1961; destroyed in 1989).

Continue reading…