Kustaa Saksi | ScandinavianDesign.com

Kustaa Saksi is a Finnish artist and designer based in Amsterdam, known for large jacquard-woven tapestries. His works are fields where forms hide and reveal themselves: figures surface and retreat, images fragment and reassemble, and patterns branch at every scale like fractals. In 2023 he received the Pro Finlandia Medal of the Order of the Lion of Finland.

Background

Saksi was born in 1975 in Kouvola, Finland. He first became known as an illustrator and graphic artist, and in 2013 he and the architect Gert Wingårdh designed the Hello! installation at the Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair. Since then textiles have been at the centre of his work, both as art and as design for industry. One example is the woven Nature fabric, which brought new colour to the classic Lamino chair by Swedese.

Artistic approach

Saksi has experienced migraine with visual aura since childhood. Its logic runs through his work as a system rather than a subject, most directly in the series First Symptoms. Material matters as much as image: paper, rubber, mohair, wool, synthetics and metal are combined so that a dull thread turns to light and a soft one seems as solid as stone. Many works draw on myths and folk tales, such as Mythology (2021), thirteen woven works about figures of transformation and survival.

Key works

A World in Waiting (2017), made with IC-98 for the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Goethe-Institut, imagines the Svalbard Global Seed Vault two thousand years from now, overgrown by forest. Seeds of the depicted plants are woven into the fabric. Woodwose (2024) shows the wild man of medieval legend built from the same pattern as the forest around him. Roots/Racines (2025), a fifteen-metre pine tree woven in washi paper yarn and wood-based viscose, hangs from the ceiling of the Institut finlandais in Paris.

Exhibitions

Saksi’s work has been shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Cooper Hewitt in New York, EMMA in Espoo and Kunsthall Stavanger. In 2023 Design Museum Helsinki held the major exhibition In the Borderlands, covering a decade of jacquard weaving. Vandalorum in Värnamo followed with Borderlands, his first solo museum exhibition in Sweden. He was the first Guest Creative of the Stockholm Furniture Fair in 2025, and was nominated as Designer of the Year at the Scandinavian Design Awards 2023.