Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1976 Aiko Tezuka currently lives in Berlin, Germany. In 2001, Tezuka completed the Master’s Degree programme in Painting at Musashino Art University, Tokyo (studied under sculptor Toya Shigeo). In 2005, she completed a PhD in Painting at the Art Research Department of Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto, Japan (studied under painter Usami Keiji). In 2010, after receiving the Goto Commemorative Cultural Award for Emerging Artists, she moved to the UK. Subsequent to that, she relocated to Germany as a recipient of the Emerging Artists Overseas Training Award granted by the Agency for Cultural Affairs. Since 1997, she has produced artworks that unravel woven fabric. While referencing and appropriating historically significant objects, artifacts and works of art, she reconfigures the fabric of things by devising a unique method.

The philosophy of deconstruction and reconstruction lies at the center of Aiko Tezuka’s dizzyingly intricate textile works. Since the beginning of her art practice Tezuka has been interested in the surface of objects. What makes up the surface of the object? What is behind the surface? Can the surface be pulled back? Although we inhabit a surface world, it’s a material limit that we often take for granted. Every time we peel a surface, a new surface will appear immediately – an infinite loop, rendering the surface unreachable and invisible. The artist’s central inquiry probes the very fabric of existence, questioning how to peel away layers and render the invisible visible.

Tezuka combines high and low art and especially accentuates the outlines of these images, showing mostly fabrics with-out the corresponding bodies in their various draperies. The images, embroidered by Tezuka onto the translucent fabric, pick up elements from painting, sculpture and tapestry and reveal close ties between these forms of art. For Tezuka, time is the clandestine force residing just beyond these immutable surfaces. Uncharted rainbows of color spill from tightly woven compositions. With the meticulous unraveling of textile surfaces, into myriad threads, the artist reverses time and in the process, demystifies her unspooled surfaces. These undone tapestries become an exploration of what lies beneath, a reflection on the threads that bind past, present, and future.