Saarijärvi Museum: Art and History All Year Round

Saarijärvi Museum is a modern and versatile local art and culturohistorical museum in the northern part of the Lakeland Finland. The main building of the Saarijärvi Museum is open all year round with its high-quality exhibitions. The outdoor area includes an extensive Sculpture park and a traditional vegetable garden. In addition to the main building, the museum has summer attractions in the Stone Age Village and Tapper Brothers’ Juhola.

 

Contact Information, Opening Hours and Tickets

 

Current and Upcoming Exhibitions

Naturally Creative – Permanent Exhibition of Fine Arts in Saarijärvi
Open according to the museum’s changing exhibitions

The permanent exhibition presents art created by artists from Saarijärvi and born in Saarijärvi over a period of approximately 100 years. It also includes art created in Saarijärvi or related to Saarijärvi by artists from outside the city. The exhibition is divided into three sections: portraits and self-portraits, landscapes and contemporary art, through which the aim is to present a wide range of artists, eras and art movements. The works in the exhibition are from the collections of the City of Saarijärvi, the Beda, Katri and Aune Herala Foundation and the Saarijärvi Mannila Art Foundation, which are managed by the Saarijärvi Museum.

 

Saarat – Art by Saara Pylvänäinen and Saara Vallineva
Saarijärvi Museum 1 Oct 2026 – 10 Jan 2027

Born 90 years ago in Viitasaari, Saara Pylvänäinen (1936–2016) lived and worked in the village of Hoikankylä in Saarijärvi for most of her life. She focused her art on Piikkana textiles® from 1977 and on paintings from 1996 onwards. The nature of Central Finland with its different seasons served as her inspiration.

Saara Vallineva (b. 1982) is a visual artist, author and illustrator. She uses local and found materials as part of her works. The exhibition features mixed media works, as well as illustrations for books. The works are inspired by folk art, crafts, maps and cultural heritage sites.

 

Tamara Piilola
Pöheikössä — In the Thick of It
Saarijärvi Museum 28 Jan – 25 Apr 2027

Tamara Piilola (b. 1977) is a painter whose large-scale works depict nature as lush, luminous and slightly enigmatic. Her landscapes and vegetation draw on photographic observation, yet in the process of painting they are transformed into new visions through memory, imagination and free composition. The lushness and vivid colours of her works draw the viewer in, yet nature never appears quite as one might expect.

In Piilola’s carefully constructed visual world, representation and painterliness are in constant dialogue. Light and shadow, pure colours and visible brushwork shape the image, while an abundance of detail can at times approach abstraction. Rooted in the long tradition of landscape painting, Piilola creates works in which nature becomes both recognisable and imagined—a world where observation and imagination meet.

Photography is an important starting point in Piilola’s work, but the finished painting is never simply a reproduction of a photograph. Photographs, sketches and compositions developed from them provide the initial material, which is gradually transformed through the process of painting. Piilola is particularly interested in what happens when a familiar view is taken out of its original setting and begins to exist within the painting as a world of its own. Her landscapes can therefore feel both recognisable and difficult to place.

Bringing together works made between 2015 and 2026, the exhibition gives an overview of Piilola’s artistic practice over more than a decade. Landscape and vegetation remain central themes, yet through them a wide range of moods and worlds emerge: lush gardens, dense thickets and imaginative landscapes in which the beauty of nature is touched by a sense of transience and the passage of time. Taken as a whole, the exhibition leads the viewer to places that seem both near and far—landscapes in which observation becomes memory, landscape becomes imagination, and the abundance of vegetation becomes almost a world of its own.

 

Hevosella pää-see
A Horse Makes the World Go Around
Saarijärvi Museum 19 May – 17 Oct 2027

The exhibition ’A Horse Makes the World Go Around’ uses art, cultural and historical objects and photographs to tell the story of the relationship between horses and humans and the characteristics associated with horses. The stages of the breed Finnish horse and its use for various purposes in history and today are also illustrated in visual presentations. The horse is discussed in various forms of art, such as sculptures, paintings and graphics. The main artist of the exhibition is the Jyväskylä based sculptor Kirsi Tapper. Works by Hannes Autere, Yrjö Hakala, Anneli Klemola, Riitta Uusitalo and Kain Tapper are also included.

The exhibition at the Saarijärvi Museum is connected to the anniversary of the Finnish horse. In 2027, it will be 120 years since the establishment of the breed’s state studbook. The Museum of Central Finland celebrates its anniversary with the exhibition ’The Finnish Horse – Our National Treasure’, which opens at the Aalto2 Museum Centre, telling the story of the Finnish horse from its beginnings to the present day.