Marta Sarasuati

Marta Sarasuati is a Spanish multifaceted artist born in Madrid in 1977, where she lives and works. She has developed her work from the visual, performing, and literary arts to cultural anthropology research and even artisanal jewelry. Currently, after the publication of her illustrated poetry anthology “Tribulaciones Aspasianas” in 2024, she is exploring the performative limits of the words in relation to other arts such as dance and painting. Just like she does in her poetry, in her painting she brings references from her own experiences, many times evoquing spiritual and deep mystical transformation trances. This is why she also finds inspiration in occultism’s symbolism, ancient cultures and unconventional phenomena, such as orbs and rods. 

Deeply influenced by abstract expressionism and aboriginal art, among others, she emphasizes the process rather than the idea. And even though her semi abstract figures 一she likes to call them a kind of syncretic symbolism一 may resemble often human or hybrid characters, their construction is always a result of intuition and serendipity. And this serendipia is one of the reasons why Sarasuati consideres art as a spiritual journey. And artworks as a magical totem.

Marta Sarasuati studied Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) between the years 1996 and 1999. Although she didn’t finish the full graduation because of health issues, she achieved a Cum Laude qualification in the subjects of “Elements of Plastic Arts” and “Psychology of the Image”. She was awarded with a second prize at an outdoors painting contest when she was a teenager and also she won the first prize at the Isofotón Christmas contest in 2008. Also, she painted a lot by herself among the class exercises during her college years and organized three solo exhibitions of her works in Madrid during that time. Many works were sold, and her drypoint engravings were the most popular. Apart from the artworks that are part of private collections, a lot of them were sadly lost due to several reasons. Years later, in 2015, she organized another solo exhibition at the School of Arts and Crafts of Granada while she was studying jewelry. She had created during two years a collection of colorful mandala drawings with felted and metallic markers on printing paper. Sarasuati has combined art making with other artistic practices, which added to her nomadic way of life, painting on canvas is something that she only did in her first period. But now she’s establishing a new studio and will soon be painting again on fabric.