SANTA MONICA, CA.- Christopher Grimes Gallery announces an exhibition of new work by Kota Ezawa. This is Ezawa’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first gallery solo show in Los Angeles. Ezawa’s work references images in popular culture, cinema, television and art history. Through such media as digital animation, slide projections, paper cut-outs, watercolor, light boxes, and collage, he recontextualizes and distills these iconic images to their most essential forms, communicating the symbolic power they have on the collective psyche. For this exhibition Ezawa will present a series of paintings and silver gelatin prints derived from historical photographs and paintings that underscores a keen understanding of how images shape our experience and memory of events.

Ezawa (Cologne, Germany, 1969) lives and works in San Francisco. He received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from Stanford University. Ezawa’s work has been shown in solo projects and exhibitions at Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite, Vancouver, Canada (2012); The Box, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2009); Hayward Gallery Project Space, London, England (2007); Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2006); and Matrix 154, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2005). He has participated in group exhibitions such as After Photoshop, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2013); HERE., Pilara Foundation, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA (2011); The More Things Change, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2011); and The Moving Image: Scan to Screen, Pixel to Projection, Orange County Museum of Art (2009). Ezawa’s work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, among others.