Finnish Design: Myths & Moomins
26 September – 20 December 2026
Finland’s landscape, its forests, lakes, ice and shifting northern light, has long shaped a national imagination in which the natural and the mythic are inseparable. Elemental forces, transformation, resilience and craft run through generations of Finnish storytelling, and those same qualities resurface in the country’s modern design: clarity, restraint, quiet strength, and a profound respect for the natural world.
This is the imagination behind Alvar Aalto’s flowing furniture and glassware, Tapio Wirkkala’s sculptural forms carved and blown to echo ice and snow, and Timo Sarpaneva’s glasswork for Iittala. It’s there too in Maija Isola’s bold nature-inspired prints for Marimekko, including her celebrated Unikko poppy design, and in Kaj Franck’s quietly radical approach to everyday tableware.
Rare loans from Moomin Characters
In 1945, the first Moomin book was published, and within a decade the inhabitants of Moominvalley had reached an audience of millions. As demand grew, their creator, artist and writer Tove Jansson (1914–2001), founded Moomin Characters in 1958 with her brother Lars to protect and oversee her work, the company that remains the source of the rare objects on loan for this exhibition. Like much of the design and craft developed in Finland around this time, nature in Tove Jansson’s stories is an intrinsic element of the Moomin Stories.
The loans include original ceramic Moomin figurines from the 1950s and 1990s, produced by Arabia, alongside a set of Moomin plates from the late 1950s, the earliest Moomin tableware, with dish shapes designed by Kaj Franck. Many of these early pieces are now highly sought after, and the exhibition offers a rare chance to see them together in one place.
