EXHIBITIONS

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

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ROCKEFELLER CENTER, NYC

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THE ENLIGHTENMENT - ROCKEFELLER CENTER, NYC -

The Enlightenment - Rockefeller Center, NYC with Art Production Fund

NEW YORK, NY - Rockefeller Center and Art Production Fund welcome Los Angeles-based artist Greg Ito to New York City for a vibrant new summer exhibition. The Enlightenment is part of the ongoing Art in Focus program, now in its seventh year, presented at Rockefeller Center in partnership with Art Production Fund. Free and open to the public, the exhibition transforms one of New York’s most well-known landmarks into an immersive journey filled with rich symbolism and dreamlike motifs. On view from June 2 - August 29, audiences are invited to explore key pillars of Ito’s practice (painting, sculpture, installation and film) in this ambitious exhibition.

The Enlightenment showcases Ito’s signature use of vivid color, recurring motifs, and storytelling across multiple mediums celebrating themes of growth, renewal, and transformation. This marks the first time Ito will exhibit both his painting and photographic work side by side in a public space of this scale.

The vitrine spaces of 45 Rockefeller Plaza are activated with three-dimensional installations that combine painting and sculpture. The vitrines become sculptural dioramas of interior spaces, functioning as portals and echoing themes of regeneration and resilience. Each vitrine depicts a vibrant scene, where window motifs and sculptural props are intertwined to create a layered emotional landscape. The progression of day to twilight will anchor the rhythm of the story, framed by windows within blooming interiors. Ito’s work employs a rich visual language - flames, blooming flowers, the sun, and other symbols - to illuminate the interconnected cycles of the natural world and human experience.

Beneath the 45 Rockefeller Center lobby, on the Rink level, a panoramic vinyl installation unfolds a narrative that brings together Ito’s painting and photography for the first time. Each photograph captures a meticulously staged moment, inviting viewers to follow a transformative journey starring the artist himself, toward enlightenment. The core pillars of Ito’s practice - painting, sculpture, installation, and film - remain the foundation of his visual language, while photography acts as the connective tissue, uniting these elements into a single, immersive experience. Spanning 125 feet, the installation draws inspiration from New York’s rich history of theater and Los Angeles’ legacy of cinema.

Imagery from Ito’s paintings will also appear across the Center in several public locations (30 Rockefeller Plaza, 10 Rockefeller Plaza, 50 Rockefeller Plaza, and more). The large-scale vinyl imagery reflects Ito’s cinematic influences and personal mythology: sunsets, doorways, flames, and magical landscapes, with each piece acting as a visual chapter in a larger story of transformation.

Installation view of The Enlightenment at Rockefeller Center, NYC with Art Production Fund, 2025.

Detail view of The Enlightenment at Rockefeller Center, NYC with Art Production Fund, 2025.

Artist portrait at Rockefeller Center, NYC with Art Production Fund, 2025.

MOTION PICTURES

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LONG BEACH MUSEUM OF ART

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MOTION PICTURES - LONG BEACH MUSEUM OF ART -

MOTION PICTURES - Long Beach Museum of Art, 2024.

MOTION PICTURES is a solo exhibition of works by Los Angeles based painter Greg Ito. This exhibition will be Ito’s second institutional survey, continuing a cycle which began with past exhibitions and bodies of work. The various stages of his life, from adolescence, to husband, to father are represented through the culmination of the natural elements of water, fire, air, and earth in the form of paintings, sculpture, and Ito’s first video installation. Ito is a vibrant storyteller, and uses the sensory elements of light, texture, and poignant nostalgic objects to engage the viewer’s memory and to foster connection between his own story and the audience’s personal histories. Ito’s past exhibitions have reflected on his family lineage and how his parents, grandparents, and Japanese heritage have impacted his life and outlook.

This exhibition is supported in part by the Pasadena Art Alliance.

Installation view of MOTION PICTURES at Long Beach Museum of Art, 2024-25.

Full Circle, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 58.5" x 193". (148.59 x 490.22 cm).

Full Circle, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 58.5" x 193". (148.59 x 490.22 cm).

Feast, 2024. Wood, fire, enamel, silk flowers, charcoal. Dimensions variable.

Feast, 2024 (detail). Wood, fire, enamel, silk flowers, charcoal. Dimensions variable.

Worldly Possesion, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 48” x 60”. (121.92 x 152.4 cm).

Worldly Possesion, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 48” x 60”. (121.92 x 152.4 cm).

Burn Brightly, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 60” x 60”. (152.4 x 152.4 cm).

Burn Brightly, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 60” x 60”. (152.4 x 152.4 cm).

Light After Darkness, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 60” x 48”. (152.4 x 121.92 cm).

Light After Darkness, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 60” x 48”. (152.4 x 121.92 cm).

Time Flies, 2024. Resin, epoxy, enamel, clock oscillator. 15.5” x 12.5” x 3.5”. (39.37 x 31.75 x 8.89 cm)

Home Sweet Home, 2024. Resin, epoxy, enamel, plexiglass, LED light fixture. 16.5” x 12” x 15”. (41.90 x 30.48 x 38.1 cm).

Light the Way, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 60” x 38”. (152.4 x 96.52 cm).

Inner Flame, 2024. Resin, epoxy, enamel, acrylic paint, light fixture. 78” x 15” x 15”. (198.12 x 38.1 x 38.1 cm).

The Winds of Change, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 60” x 48”. (152.4 x 121.92 cm).

The Winds of Change, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 60” x 48”. (152.4 x 121.92 cm).

Finders Keepers, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 36” x 96”. (91.44 x 243.84 cm).

Finders Keepers, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over wood panel. 36” x 96”. (91.44 x 243.84 cm).

Passage, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over wood panel, acrylic wall painting, light fixture. 84” x 42” x 6". (213.36 x 106.68 x 15.24 cm).

Passage, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over wood panel, acrylic wall painting, light fixture. 84” x 42” x 6". (213.36 x 106.68 x 15.24 cm).

Superbloom, 2024. Installation Prop: Standing Lamp.

Superbloom, 2024. Installation Prop: Suitcase.

Superbloom, 2024. Installation Prop: Mens shoes.

Superbloom, 2024. Installation Prop: Wood chair.

Superbloom, 2024. Installation Prop (detail): Wood chair

SINK OR SWIM

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Anat ebgi new york

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SINK OR SWIM - Anat ebgi new york -

Sink or Swim - Anat Ebgi Gallery, New York, 2024.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Greg Ito: Sink or Swim on view at 372 Broadway from March 20 through April 25. This is Ito’s first solo exhibition in New York and presents an installation of paintings and a large sculpture. An opening reception will take place on Wednesday, March 20 from 6 – 8pm.

Up to their necks in water, visitors wade into an immersive panorama of unfolding disaster. Extending the drama of Ito’s pictures into space, a golden shark has made its home in the flood waters. Submerging the gallery in rising tides—of fear, precarity, and hardships—he sets the stage of a chaotic, but ultimately dreamy catastrophe. In a final gesture of hope for rescue, a doomed someone tosses out a message in a bottle.

Precision and a steady hand guide Ito’s painting process. His simple iconography is intricately rendered by hand in carefully applied layers of off-the-shelf house paints. The resulting paintings are simultaneously complex, flowing with color, syncopated rhythm, structure, and intensity. Absent brushstrokes, he embraces the flatness and sleekness of storybooks and computer graphics in a tradition hearking back to Pop art’s incorporation of industrial and advertorial strategies as critiques of consumer culture and the capitalist doom cycle. Lurking below the surface, a sculpture of a shark emerges from the gallery floor. Greatly feared, the creature must continuously swim to pump oxygen into its gills or it will die; Ito’s shark seems required to feed on gold coins.

The domestic scenes of Ito’s paintings are dense with rich imagery: objects left behind in the dash to higher ground, personal effects that nod to Ito’s heritage such as kokeshi dolls and his family crest, to starfish creeping up the wallpaper, oblivious to the disaster which brought them to their new home. Chrysalises, figurines of deer, a choo choo train, juxtaposed by floating pill bottles and liquor bottles are suggestive of innocence and its loss. Folding the autobiographical into the universal, Ito’s recurring motifs speak to his experiences as a new father—watching his young daughter grow up, pondering uncertainty about the world she will inherit, and how to persist through life’s many challenges in the face of crippling doubt.

Central throughout Ito’s work is the dual nature of life: ups and downs, rebirth amidst destruction, order and disorder. Equally nightmarish and dreamy, in an arched painting, Ito has placed a miniature landscape, composed like a still life of mushrooms, poppies, and mounds of earth, the ecosystem in miniature rests atop the bureau. Nature’s unstoppable forces encroach, against all obstacles the will to thrive persists. The gallery, the paintings on the wall, and the visitors to the exhibition are tossed into the melodrama of Ito’s shark infested waters. The provocation is uncomplicated but profound, engulfed by water, will we sink or swim through the inexorable tide of existence?

Installation view of Sink or Swim at Anat Ebgi Gallery, New York. 2024.

Big Fish Small Pond, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over panel. 48”x60” (121.92 x 152.4 cm).

Big Fish Small Pond, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over panel. 48”x60” (121.92 x 152.4 cm).

The Archive, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over panel. 95.5”x48” (242.57 x 121.92 cm).

The Archive, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over panel. 95.5”x48” (242.57 x 121.92 cm).

Sit With Me, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over panel. 60”x48” (152.4 x 121.92 cm).

Sit With Me, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over panel. 60”x48” (152.4 x 121.92 cm).

Lifetime Journey, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over panel. 60”x48” (152.4 x 121.92 cm).

Lifetime Journey, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over panel. 60”x48” (152.4 x 121.92 cm).

Another Door Opens, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over panel. 95”x48” (41.3 x 121.92 cm).

Another Door Opens, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over panel. 95”x48” (41.3 x 121.92 cm).

Sink or Swim, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over panel. 95”x282” (241.3 x 716.28 cm).

Sink or Swim, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over panel. 95”x282” (241.3 x 716.28 cm).

Carry Me Away, 2024. Acrylic on canvas over panel. 60”x60” (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

Carry Me Away, 2024 (detail). Acrylic on canvas over panel. 60”x60” (152.4 x 152.4 cm)

The Swimmer, 2024. Expanded polystyrene foam, steel and hard coat. 38”x140”x50” (96.52 x 355.6 x 127 cm).

The Swimmer, 2024 (detail). Expanded polystyrene foam, steel and hard coat. 38”x140”x50” (96.52 x 355.6 x 127 cm).

ALL YOU CAN CARRY

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ica san diego

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ALL YOU CAN CARRY - ica san diego -

All You Can Carry - ICA San Diego.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego is pleased to present All You Can Carry, a solo exhibition and experience by Los Angeles-based Greg Ito at ICA San Diego North. In All You Can Carry, Ito delves into his family’s history in the Japanese American Internment Camps during WWII as a way to address our connection with ancestry, American identity, and the objects and memories that fill our homes.

Visitors to All You Can Carry are invited to enter Ito’s history highlighting his grandparents’ relationship and their experience in camp. The exhibition navigates conversations of trauma, memory, tradition, and as Ito describes, “the power of family, love, and perseverance.” On February 19th, 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 that incarcerated Japanese Americans on the West Coast in internment camps in California, Arizona, and later, to other states. Only allowed the belongings they could carry, Ito’s family members were forced to think about what was most important to them. Along with their homes and businesses, an entire Japanese American community of about 120,000 people were uprooted by the swift signature by FDR.

In the first gallery, Ito reflects on his family’s experience through coded symbols found in his paintings, including keyholes as points of access, the home as shelter, flowers as renewal, the red sun as heritage, ginkgo leaves as memory, butterflies as transformation, and fire as loss and tragedy. Continuing to the second gallery, Ito creates an installation representing a burnt home containing new sculptures and family ephemera from the camp.

“How do we overcome tragedy, fear, and hatred? How do we hold onto the faint glimmer of light that will shine through the rest of our lives and future generations?” asks Ito.

Ito’s grandfather’s job at camp was a watchman of the water tower that stood high on a hill above Gila River Internment Camp, Arizona. Ito invites visitors to climb the hill of ICA North as a performative pilgrimage, a pathway for visitors to transform their traumas and personal baggage into new forms of hope for a better future. California native wildflower seeds, handed to visitors upon their arrival, may be planted in the hilltop installation of charcoal and soil for self-renewal. To complete the performance Ito will water the seeds planted by visitors only using the water he can carry with his two hands.

Installation view of All You Can Carry at ICA San Diego. 2022.

All You Can Carry, 2022, ICA San Diego, Documentation of Performance.

APPARITION

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anat ebgi los angeles

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APPARITION - anat ebgi los angeles -

Apparition - Anat Ebgi Los Angeles.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Apparition, an immersive exhibition by Los Angeles artist Greg Ito. On view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, opening Saturday, October 2, 2021. This is Ito’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and follows up The Arrival of Spring, a solo presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong earlier this year.

In six new paintings Ito deep-dives into his expansive cinematic compositions. These works contemplate themes of new life, metamorphosis, and the ghosts we live with—personal history, generational trauma, and the invisible weight of being alive. Among Ito’s subjects are flaming hillsides of Southern California, sprawling city streets surveilled by helicopters, and smoky sunsets; this darker imagery is contrasted by blooming poppies, flittering ginkgo leaves, and butterflies.

In his largest painting to date, a five-paneled work titled Motion Picture, Ito depicts a dramatic and layered landscape framed by arched floor to ceiling windows and billowing burning curtains. Fundamentally a storyteller, the artist is driven by the momentum of narrative and repeating motifs—moons, suns, flames, keyholes, clocks, teapots, and horizons—that operate with a dreamlike logic that is playful with scale, superimposition, and silhouettes.

Prominent in a corner of the gallery is a large house with a pristine facade that visitors can enter. Once inside, it is revealed to be damaged and burned out. The house on fire is a recurring symbol for Ito and functions conceptually as a self portrait. It speaks not only to his grandparents’ experience as Japanese-Americans during World War II and their forced removal to internment camps, but also his own experience as a fourth-generation Angeleno with immigrant roots. For immigrant families, home is both where you are and elsewhere; it is a fleeting and fragile refuge from the outside world, where connection to the past is preserved and hopes for the future are nurtured. The idea of home also takes on a new profound meaning for Ito, who became a father earlier this year, speaking to his desire to build a secure and stable life for his new family.

Two sculptures in the exhibition underscore spiritual and mystic elements of Ito’s practice. Placed outside the house is a floating teapot fountain that appears to be infinitely pouring itself into a stone wishing well. Inside the house, a bowl of ramen with a pair of hashi suspended midair, spin clockwise infinitely on a table. Both works draw attention to metaphysical and oppositional forces—presence and absence.