Kota Ezawa
Kota Ezawa (German, Japanese, American, born 1969), The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 2015, Duratrans transparency and lightbox, 62 x 50 in. Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School, 2019.3.
Kota Ezawa’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee is a to-scale recreation of the 1633 painting of the same name by Rembrandt van Rijn. Rembrandt’s work was one of thirteen masterpieces infamously stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, and which remain missing to this day. As Ezawa has stated, “[I felt compelled to produce this series] dealing with stolen art works because my own process of appropriation 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.”