Internship at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

Working on Suzanne Perlman’s Road to Brakkeput was especially rewarding because the treatment required me to understand not only the materials but also the artist’s background and the environment in which the work was created. Perlman was a Jewish refugee from the Netherlands who rebuilt her life as an artist on Curaçao after the war. Her story, the climate she worked in, and the conditions the work was exposed to all influenced my decisions: what signs of age or lived history to leave untouched, what to stabilise, and how far certain interventions should go.

It was also great to work in an interdisciplinary setting with Perlman’s son, who manages her estate (and who, among other helpful details, shared lovely photos of her studio), as well as researchers Sarah Casteel and Rosa de Jong, who study Black and Jewish history and the movement of Jewish refugees to the Caribbean. Their insights helped place the painting within a broader cultural and historical context.

Interestingly, many of the ageing features I observed were directly linked to Curaçao’s tropical climate, which became an essential part of understanding the work, almost as much as the composition itself.