Kustaa Saksi (b. 1975, Kouvola, Finland) is an artist based in Amsterdam. His works are fields where forms hide and reveal themselves — always mid-growth, never fully caught.

Vision stops being reliable here. Figures surface and retreat. Images fragment, repeat, reassemble into something else. Thread interlaces thread until something appears, and then does not. The logic is fractal — the same structures branching at every scale, through roots and networks. Saksi has experienced migraine with visual aura since childhood, and its logic runs through the work as a system, not a subject. Images break into pattern. Pattern breaks into noise.

Finding the right material matters as much as the image itself: paper, rubber, mohair, wool, synthetics, metal, each hiding what it is until it isn't. A dull thread turns to light. A soft one holds like stone. The surface is never background. It is the thing itself.

Saksi's work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Royal Academy of Arts, London; Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art; Design Museum Helsinki; and Kunsthall Stavanger, and is held in major public and private collections. In 2023, he was awarded the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland.

Roots/Racines

Institut finlandais, Paris
2025

Japanese washi paper
Wood-based viscose

1500 × 320 cm
590⅝ × 125⅞ in.


Roots/Racines suspends a fifteen-metre pine tree from the ceiling — uprooted but still alive, held in the air. The tree fills the room from above. Standing beneath it is something between shelter and vertigo.

The work draws on the twisted pines in the paintings of Pekka Halonen. Here the tree becomes something more uncertain — lifted from the ground, roots still intact.

The material follows its own logic. Washi paper yarn and wood-based viscose — the tree is made from the material of trees. The surface absorbs light rather than reflecting it, giving the work a quiet luminosity, as if the forms were emerging from within.

Roots/Racines was first shown at the Institut finlandais in Paris, 2025–2026, in dialogue with the exhibition Pekka Halonen: An Ode to Finland at the Petit Palais.

Silent Mode

2025

Japanese washi paper
Wood-based viscose

220 × 340 cm
86⅝ × 133⅞ in.


Silent Mode assembles animals, rivers, and pattern systems drawn from sources as far apart as ancient Greek pottery and Nordic textile traditions. The forms accumulate and overlap without settling into a single clear image — caught somewhere between recognition and something more uncertain.

At the centre of it all, almost hidden, a small rabbit sits quietly.

The freely hanging fringes dissolve the edge of the work into the surrounding space.

A World in Waiting

Victoria and Albert Museum, London
2017

In collaboration with IC-98

Linen, acrylic, cotton, viscose, 
polyester, encapsulated seeds

553 × 302 cm
217¾ × 118⅞ in.


A World in Waiting imagines Europe two thousand years from now. Sea levels have risen. Humans are long gone. The tapestry depicts the site of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, where seeds from around the world have sprouted into dense forest in the warmer climate of the far future.

The work was commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Goethe-Institut as part of Collecting Europe, a project inviting artists to imagine the continent's distant future. The seeds of the depicted plants are woven directly into the fabric — making the tapestry itself a vessel for what comes next.

Woodwose

2024

Japanese washi paper yarn
Wood-based viscose

165 x 245 cm
65 x 96½ in.


The Woodwose is a figure from medieval European tradition — a wild man of the forest, covered in leaves and branches, existing at the boundary between the human world and the natural one. Neither fully one nor the other.

Here the figure and the forest are built from the same visual system. The body doesn't emerge from the pattern — it is the pattern. Two eyes hold the centre, staring outward. Everything else keeps shifting.

Mythology

2021

Mohair, wool, cotton, linen, silk,
copper, rubber, polyester

170 × 245 cm
66⅞ x 96½ in.

Mythology brings together thirteen woven works drawn from legends and folk tales — figures of transformation, trickery, and survival that appear across cultures in remarkably similar forms. Like fractals, myths repeat. The same structures recur in different places, different languages, different centuries. Woven in silk, gold thread, and metallic yarns, the surfaces shift with light and hold together as something simultaneously ancient and uncertain.