Ryuta Iida was born in 1981 in Shizuoka. As a sculpture student at Nihon University College of Art, he won the grand prize in the 22nd Exhibition of Graphic Art Hitotsubo-ten, and a Kitano Foundation scholarship.

His career has grown from strength to strength, with works shown at various venues and exhibitions, such as graf media gm, Fact of Accumulation 07, Osaka 2007, Bunkamura Gallery Arts & Crafts and Gallery +, Tokyo 2006 and more. He teamed up with Yoshihisa Tanaka, a graphic designer at Coil, to form the unit [Nerhol], which exhibited at Tokyo’s Calm and Punk Gallery. Iida is always searching for new points of inspiring intersection between his own practice and that of artists and domains which he actively relates to.

“A thing having a sense of material and a sense of information,
A thing for which the act relates a direct desire,
A thing which is common and anybody has,
It is a book which I choose as material.”

Iida uses paper and books, common everyday objects as material for his sculpture. Iida’s approach to his chosen medium liberates the letters and text from the programmatic nature of the book, whose typical function and revolving around its thickness and readability. In this way, he fundamentally changes our stereotypical conceptions of what books and letters are.