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Binnenkant 39
1011BM Amsterdam
The Netherlands
+31 627315476


Kustaa Saksi (b. 1975, Kouvola, Finland) is an artist based in Amsterdam. His work begins where vision stops being reliable — where images fragment, repeat, and refuse to settle. The boundary between what is seen and what is imagined dissolves.




Working across large-scale installations and woven works, Saksi builds environments where pattern, light, and material produce images that shift as they are approached. Grids, mirrored forms, and fractal structures keep returning — not as motifs but as systems through which images appear, dissolve, and come back changed. This logic runs through nature — roots, networks, branching — and through the visual disturbances of migraine aura, which Saksi has experienced since childhood. In these states perception reorganises itself without permission. Images break into pattern. Pattern breaks into noise.

The work is also physical. Textile, paper, and synthetic fibres construct surfaces with weight, texture, and dimension. Something you can touch, turn around, get wrapped in.

Saksi's work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art; Design Museum Helsinki; Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan; and Kunsthall Stavanger. He has held solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam, and his work 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.


Exhibitions
PressCollectionsPublicationsFilmsResidenciesHonours
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 with roots intact. The tree draws on the twisted pines that appear throughout the paintings of Pekka Halonen, but here it becomes something more uncertain: a form caught between collapse and survival. Woven entirely from wood-based materials, the work creates a canopy that fills the room, and the space beneath it becomes a place to gather.
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

Mohair,  wool, polyester, 
encapsulated seeds


 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.