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; Institut finlandais, Paris; 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.
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; Institut finlandais, Paris; 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.