23. Salustiano Martha

Salustiano Martha (1950) comes from Curaçao and started working in clay in 1975. He was trained as a ceramist in the 1970s by Len Gillen at the workshops in Suffisant. In 1977 he goes to the Netherlands for a year to learn how to glaze. Once back on Curaçao, he makes free forms in clay and builds his own recognizable visual language. In 1986 he returned to the Netherlands where he settled and continued to develop as an artist. He gets his inspiration from the multicultural society. With his work he wants to show the colorful bond between people and he wants to express his feeling of warmth, love and freedom. His Afro-Indian background is evident in his work. The work of visual artist Salustiano Martha consists of small figurines up to life-size assembled monumental clay sculptures, all of which are very expressive. Humans, animals and the colorful bond between people themselves are the sources of inspiration for his work. With his sculptures he expresses his feeling for warmth, love and freedom. A freedom that is also expressed in the ability to make large monumental, sometimes fragile, clay sculptures. In 2021 he returned to Curaçao with a large part of his oeuvre and since then he has regularly opened his own sculpture garden, on Seru Fortuna, with its many monumental ceramic statues.