Flowers

Kota Ezawa
Printmaking
2009

Cardinal Hall, Fifth Floor

Kota Ezawa, born in Germany in 1969, is German-Japanese American artist who lives and works in San Francisco and Berlin. Ezawa creates light boxes, videos, and works on paper that portray current events and popular culture. To contrast the provocative and heavy topics in his work, Ezawa depicts his subjects in a 2-D, flattened style -- a technique reminiscent of his background in video animation -- and pays homage to the value of photography in memorializing historical moments.
 
The artist Katya Bonnefant asked the artist to make a drawing of flowers for her. The source image of flowers is from a found photograph that the requesting artist gave to Kota Ezawa. Ezawa was inspired by the element of collaboration and dialog with another artist that called for something he does not normally do.
 
Ezawa holds an MFA from Stanford University and a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute. In 2006, he received the prestigious SECA Art Award from the San Francisco Museum of Art and in 2010, he received the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, CA. His art has been collected by renowned institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art ,New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum Los Angeles, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.