Saint Clair Cemin (born Cruz Alta, Brazil in 1951) is a postmodern sculptor, professor, writer and film producer (610FILM). He lives and works in Woodbury, Connecticut and in Hydra, Greece.

His work encompasses multiple styles, approaches, and materials, from neo-surrealism to furniture to toys in popular culture to the history of sculpture. Cemin became interested in sculpting as a teenager. Once interested in philosophy and physics, he began to focus his attention on art, drawing and working on illustrations for magazines. Cemin earned his degree at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, from 1975-1978 where he learned printmaking for three years. He moved to New York City shortly after, where he worked in several fields, mostly with printmaking. From 1979 to 1983, Cemin went in a soul-searching mission, after seeing the exhibition of Joseph bueys at the Guggenheim. He finally began making sculpture in the summer of 1983. The artist's first exhibited sculpture was The Granny Ashtray, which has been described as an anti-modernist piece. Throughout the 1980s, Cemin became an integral part of NY's East Village art scene. Some of his works from this era are on permanent exhibition at important institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. After those formative years in NYC Cemin moved to Egypt and then Paris to pursue sculpture in different environments and with different mediums. After 2010 he returned to NY and continues to create sculptural works in his Brooklyn studio.
In 2012 Saint Clair Cemin had a public exhibition of works along Broadway in Manhattan. Of the several works exhibited on Broadway, one, "Vortex" at the corner of 57th street and Broadway, stood some 40 feet tall.

In 2005, Richard Milazzo's book on Saint Clair Cemin titled "Saint Clair Cemin: Sculptor from Cruz Alta" was published by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. A book of Saint Clair Cemin's art writings have been published by Edgewise Press titled Fragments of a Mind: Stories and Comments on Art 1987-2004.

In 1990 Saint Clair Cemins' first public sculpture was installed in the town of Reston, Virginia. Since then he has had large public monuments installed throughout the world, including "Open" in Schaumberg, Illinois, "Tree" in Bergen, Norway, "Spring" in Båstads Kommun, Sweden. The monument, "Supercuia" in Porto Alegre, Brazil and was completed in 2003. His public works also include "Fotini", "Three Graces", "Humanity", "Yggdrasil", and "Mercury Fountain". His custom works are featured prominently throughout Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature. Saint Clair Cemins' latest monumental work is the marble boat "Psyche". He received the Biennial Award from the Ueno Royal Museum and the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Japan in 1995.

Saint Clair Cemin's work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Emily Fisher Landau Collection, Long Island City, NY; Rooseum, Stockholm, Sweden; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Saint Clair is married to filmmaker Svetlana Cemin.

Extract from the book published by the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey on the occasion of Cemin’s exhibion in 1993

IN THE LIGHT OF DAY: BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION TO THE SCULPTURE OF SAINT CLAIR CEMIN

The sculpture of Saint Clair Cemin could be properly called a projection of being in the world. They appear as agents of the body, mediators of language, slipping into the world around us, each seeking to make for itself a place in the world. Each remains always close to our familiar world of objects and the body of the self, but loosen language of fixed meaning, where word and image jostle to gain the upper hand, as each swerves away from the other. One by one, they work along the borders and limits of knowledge and signs for the real.
In crossing different forms, materials, styles, the sculpture contributes to the ruin of a language of signs to which we have become accustumed and opens onto a field of new horizons, new possibilities, new worlds. Everyday objects and creatures of the world: chairs, tables, bowls, teapots, animals, humans - each of them seem at the point of arrival, as if coming into being for the first time, and yet always dreaming of other worlds, going beyond the point of recognition. They appear distracted, miscast in their role, desiring, yielding, composed, decomposing.

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The sculpture is conceived in a state of perpetual flux, metamorphosis and mutation, an errant world seeking to overcoe its incertainities or fulfill its desires through assuming other forms and spaces or mimicking the gestures of the body. This offers itself new supplies, a supplement, signs of change, revitalyzing itself by introducing the foreign into the known which estranges it and make way for the foreign. It exceeds the system, driven rather by a constant deferral, the desire to assume form, to represent or to perverse pleasure of refusal, a giving up. A lapse of order that is rather a condition of becoming, or unbecoming, a decomposition, where form falls into matter, a state of entropy, the informe. In short, the sculpture of Saint Clair Cemin is a constant detour, of reason and folly, of perception and memory, of logic and desire, of life and death. An unstable universe, where the borders of the body, of the self, of sentiment and perception are porous, flowing in and out, an informing of the world around it and a coming into being.

Charles Merewhether

For a complete overview of group exibitions from 1978 to 2002, please see the following document.