AIKO TEZUKA 手塚愛子

Aiko Tezuka (b. 1976, Tokyo, Japan) is a Japanese artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her practice is centred on the deconstruction of textiles, engaging with material as a carrier of time, memory, and cultural history. Tezuka completed her Master’s degree in Painting at Musashino Art University, Tokyo, in 2001, where she studied under the sculptor Toya Shigeo. In 2005, she completed a PhD in Painting at Kyoto City University of Arts, studying under the painter Usami Keiji. In 1997, she initiated a body of work based on the unravelling of existing textiles—an approach that has remained central to her practice. Working with found fabrics, including industrial cloth and historical garments, she systematically pulls apart woven structures, loosening threads and reconfiguring them into suspended or reassembled forms. Through this process, Tezuka does not produce new images, but rather intervenes in existing ones, treating the textile as both image and object.

Her works foreground the tension between construction and dissolution. By partially undoing the fabric, she reveals the underlying structure of the weave while allowing fragments of imagery, pattern, and ornament to persist. This act of “editing” material—rather than replacing it—positions her practice as a dialogue with history, in which the past is neither preserved intact nor erased, but held in a state of transformation. From 2010 to 2011, Tezuka lived and worked in London, supported by the Gotoh Memorial Cultural Foundation. In 2011, she relocated to Berlin with the support of a fellowship from the Japanese Government’s Overseas Study Program for Artists, where she has since been based.

Her work is held in numerous international public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Fukuoka Art Museum; The National Art Center, Tokyo; Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art; Toyota Municipal Museum of Art; Contemporary Art Museum Kumamoto; the TextielMuseum (Netherlands); the Johann Jacobs Museum(Switzerland); the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea; Turner Contemporary (UK); the Museum of Asian Art; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg; Kunsthalle Mannheim; the Rijksmuseum; and the Peranakan Museum, among others.