Kota Ezawa
Odessa Staircase Redux

The work of German-Japanese artist Koto Ezawa depicts iconic moments from art history, film, photography and popular culture, re-conceiving them as animated videos, slide projections, light boxes and prints. Odessa Staircase Redux is a kind of flipbook that revisits the famous sequence from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. The first frame of every cut is hand-redrawn in ink, and the resultant series of images is arranged to form a typology of camera angles.

Available from the publisher: http://www.jrp-ringier.com

Kota Ezawa is a Japanese-German artist currently based in San Francisco. Ezawa meticulously recreates, frame-by-frame, animated sequences from television, cinema, and art history using basic digital drawing and animation software. His aesthetic is a highly stylized mixture of Pop Art, Alex Katz, and paint-by-numbers pictures, to name but a few of his stylistic antecedents. This painstaking process creates an in intriguing facsimile of the source material, which include the Kennedy assassination, the O.J. Simpson trial, and clips from the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? (1966) .

Neither a micro-structure nor an outbuilding of a media group, JRP/Ringier has organized the production according to defined typologies and series presented hereafter, while maintaining a flexible approach toward artists’ projects. This strategy has allowed a catalogue of titles aimed at the contemporary art audience and structured around different editorial lines and timeframes to develop, often in collaboration with institutions and renowned editors. Presenting to a specialized and general public a generation of artists who emerged in the 1990s, as well as introducing the newest positions in today’s scene, our catalogue also demonstrates an interest in remaping the 1980s and in publishing significant texts and artists still overlooked today. Working with an international geography in mind and a desire to weigh on the current cultural debates, we have built the last two years a network of associate editors based in different countries to continuously review, choose, and publish artists, writers, and curators whose works, we believe, will leave their mark on our culture.