Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art on view at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia.

July 1, 2021

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Christopher Grimes Projects is pleased to present Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art on view at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Georgia. The traveling exhibition will be on display from July 17 until December 5, 2021. The exhibition includes 13 works that pay homage to the objects stolen during the Gardner Museum heist in 1990.

On the morning of March 18, 1990, two men disguised as Boston police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, tied up the guards, and spent more than an hour ransacking the galleries. They made off with 13 objects from the museum’s collection, including a Vermeer, several works by Degas, and paintings by Rembrandt. Since then, the empty frames from which the paintings were removed remain on the museum’s walls, solemn reminders of what was lost. It was one of the greatest art heists in U.S. history, and the case remains unsolved to this day.

Through a kind of appropriation, Ezawa applies his signature style to paintings and three-dimensional objects creating scale images of each of the 13 stolen artworks, displayed salon style in lightboxes on the wall—including works by Degas, Manet, Rembrandt, and Vermeer.

Ezawa’s digital interpretations of the stolen Stewart Gardner masterpieces are presented to scale and illuminated in light-boxes that serve as modern apparitions of the centuries-old works. Reduced to flat planes of color, the original paintings take on new life as Ezawa plays with ideas of appropriation and originality. Accompanying this tableau is a black-and-white two-channel video. It is based on security footage released by the museum in hopes of identifying the thieves. Here, Ezawa's reductive technique eclipses that possibility, but it reminds us just how little we know about what really happened.

Ezawa states, “My prior drawings exclusively used photographs as source material. This series for the first time draws upon painting only to recognize that painters before 1850, like Rembrandt and Vermeer, were essentially the photographers of their time. In the absence of photographs, their paintings take on the task of recording reality with the scrutiny and minuteness that we now expect from cameras”. “In this way, the new series extends my project ‘The History of Photography Remix’ into the pre-photography age of images. In addition, I feel compelled to produce an exhibition dealing with ‘stolen artworks’ because my own process could be regarded as a form of image theft. One could say I’m hoping to steal these images back and give them a new life.”

In the absence of the original works, viewers must rely solely on reproductions of the lost Stewart Gardner paintings. Whether printed in a textbook, projected in a lecture hall or gathered from Google image search results, artwork reproductions are ubiquitous. In this way, Ezawa asks: what does it mean to be original?

The exhibition was curated by Irene Hofmann and organized by SITE Santa Fe with the Mead Art Museum.

Related events include:

  • A talk by Kota Ezawa on September 7 at the museum

  • A Family Day To-Go September 9 – 12, as part of which families can pick up free art kits and an activity guide at the museum

  • A film series September 16, 23 and 30, showing the movies “Stolen,” “How to Steal a Million” and “Topkapi” at the museum

  • Toddler Tuesday on September 21 at the museum for ages 18 months to 3 years (email sagekincaid@uga.edu to sign up)

  • Student Week, organized by the Georgia Museum of Art Student Association and running September 23 – 26

  • Teen Studio: Art Heist on September 23 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. (email sagekincaid@uga.edu to sign up)

  • And a talk by Anthony Amore, director of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, on October 14 at 5:30 p.m.

All events are free and open to the public.