Turku: Admission to Turku Art Museum

Alongside a high-quality exhibition programme, the museum also stages events presented in a beautiful setting that invites interaction and relaxation. The cozy Café Victor is the place to stop for a coffee, and in summer one of the city's most spectacular terraces offers views over the city.

The Turku Art Museum's collection, which has been amassed over a hundred years, focuses on both Finnish and Nordic art. The collection is particularly known for Finnish Golden Age, surrealism, pop art, as well as self-portraits. Today, the museum's collection consists of more than 7 600 works, which are shown in the museum's temporary collection exhibitions and as loans worldwide.

The museum's National Romanesque granite castle is one of the city's most prominent landmarks and an attraction in itself. Designed by Professor Gustaf Nyström, it was the second building designed as an art museum in Finland when it was completed in 1904. Voted Turku's most beautiful building, the museum has just celebrated its 120th anniversary!

Exhibitions 2025

GUNNEL WÅHLSTRAND
6 June –14 September 2025

One of Sweden’s most important contemporary artists, Gunnel Wåhlstrand is known for her large-scale ink paintings that depict memories, people, and nature with photographic precision and poetic sensitivity. Her works are rooted in the artist’s personal history and explore themes of memory, the connection between past and present, and existential questions.

NELLI PALOMÄKI
3 October 2025 – 18 January 2026

Nelli Palomäki (b. 1981) is known for her timeless and magical black-and-white portraits of children and young people. Her work centers on the silent and delicate interaction between photographer and subject, and the concept of the uncomfortable portrait. Palomäki’s images challenge our perception of how much a photograph can truly reveal about us.

WHAT COLOUR
26 November 2024 – 8 November 2026

This exhibition, drawn from the Turku Art Museum’s collection, reflects on how the meaning of colour in visual art can be interpreted in light of current art research. The viewer is guided through the spectrums of the Golden Age, modernism, and contemporary art, featuring more than 60 works by 39 artists. The exhibition draws inspiration from theories in art, science, and philosophy, and includes thoughts on colour by contemporary artists featured in the show.

STUDIO

ROLAND PERSSON: THE COMPOSITION
6 June –14 September 2025

Roland Persson is known for his impressive silicone sculptures, cast from moulds made of real objects. The combination of tinted silicone and casting results in artworks that are both sculptural and painterly, with details rendered in strikingly illusory ways. The Composition, a raw yet beautiful and touching installation created for the Studio space, features new works completed this year and explores the fragility and vulnerability of life amid a sense of surrounding insecurity.

NORA SEDERLÖF
3 October – 23 November 2025

Nora Sederlöf’s sculptural installations combine airy textiles and metal frameworks. Familiar materials such as lace, tights, elastic bands, cords, and fringes take on new dimensions in her hands, resulting in works with powdery charm, playful lightness, and opulent exuberance—evoking boudoirs and the world of Rococo. Alongside materials, colours, forms, light, and shadow, Sederlöf also sculpts space within, between, and around her works. Their abstract forms carry rich, multilayered symbolism.

INKA BELL
28 November 2025 – 18 January 2026

Inka Bell works in the expanded field of printmaking, creating printed images, paper sculptures, and public art. Her works explore the relationship between two- and three-dimensionality through material, colour, form, and repetition. The colours and visual impressions that emerge defy verbal description and external interpretations.

DARKROOM

JULIANA HUXTABLE: PRETTY CANARY
6 June –14 September 2025

American artist, poet, musician, and DJ Juliana Huxtable works across media, blending language, imagination, and performance. Her multidisciplinary practice includes painting, photography, video, performance, music, and writing. The music video Pretty Canary (2023), created with the band Tongue in the Mind and shown in the Darkroom, brings together the many facets of Huxtable’s creative expression.

MOHAMED BOUROUISSA
3 October – 23 November 2025

Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, Algeria) often explores social themes and the experiences of immigrants in his video and photographic works. He is considered one of the most significant French artists of his generation.

SAARA EKSTRÖM: HYPNOS
28 November 2025 – 18 January 2026

The film Hypnos (2024) portrays the dream of a forest, where kamis—animistic spirits residing in all things—guide the viewer into communication with the intricate network of trees, branches, and roots. Combining Japanese tradition and Finnish forest imagery, the work highlights today’s vulnerable ecosystems and emphasizes the syncretism of nature, culture, and spirituality—and our growing alienation from nature.